


Two Night Stand

by tysonrunningfox



Category: How to Train Your Dragon (Movies)
Genre: Discussions of infidelity, F/M, astrid is ooc because she's funny, but it's hiccstrid, like i love her but she's not funny in canon and i needed her to be funny so bam she's funny, literally that amazing garbage movie two night stand, the eret/astrid is past but discussed, tightly adapted
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-05-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:55:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 32,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23657203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tysonrunningfox/pseuds/tysonrunningfox
Summary: When you're stuck inside with the person you intended to be temporary, a weekend can feel like a lifetime.
Relationships: Eret/Astrid Hofferson, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III/Astrid Hofferson, Snotlout Jorgenson/Ruffnut Thorston
Comments: 27
Kudos: 111





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Note: Yes, I did make dating profiles to do this and yes, I did get dick picks! People are animals.

Astrid wonders if the teenagers in acne commercials have always been this young. She remembers her first zit in junior high when all the pretty-skinned girls on TV looked like gurus she could look up to. Yes, beautiful adult, I will buy that overpriced pink soap if it makes me cool like you. Now they all look fourteen and awkward and she can’t imagine ever being that fresh faced. 

She also remembers when she didn’t have time to sit around and analyze infomercials, but that’s another story entirely. 

Her medical school application is the first tab open in her browser, quickly followed by fifteen more ranging from everything but a failed blog she tried to start to the top twenty songs trending in Mexico this week, and a half-filled in ok cupid profile. She remembers when online dating was funny too. When it was something divorced parents did, like some sort of crutch for a few too many shattered dreams glassing someone’s eyes. 

She thinks about writing that. Eye color: Disappointment. Hair Color: I have never seen the sun. I look like: I peaked at 20. 

She didn’t used to be like this. She didn’t used to look at the clock every ten minutes, hoping only five had passed. It’s four thirty and Ruffnut is going to be home any time now, full of stories about the office and her boyfriend and the world outside and Astrid thinks about avoiding it. About getting bundled up and seeing how far she can walk before someone notices she’s gone. Maybe it would ignite some of that old, dried up competitive spark, racing with her own desperate attempts to melt into the background. 

She flicks to her med school application. 

**Why do you want to be a doctor?:**

Her cursor has been blinking silently at her in the answer box for two weeks. It’s funny, because she knows the right answer, she’s known the right answer since she was doing her college applications four years ago, and wrote about her dreams in an essay that won a goddamn award and earned her a scholarship. 

What was it that she said again? 

Something like: “I want to be a doctor to read into the similarity between all of us. We all have the same parts, added up to such vastly different wholes, and I want to help mend our differences, as a society.”

God, she was young and idealistic and obnoxious. She misses it desperately. She misses feeling like the world was her oyster, like everything in her meticulous ten year plan would go off without the slightest hitch and she could count on spending her thirtieth birthday with her husband, on the eve of some philanthropic endeavor named after the both of them. 

She goes back to ok cupid. It wants to know everything, all of those annoying first date questions she’s never been asked, about her opinions on astrology and whether she thinks vacuuming is important. What she does for a living. Introvert or extrovert or violent psychopath. She wonders what she wants to have happen when she clicks submit.

She never got hit on much, and it was one of those absurd regrets she had to fixate on back when her life was perfect. Her mom always said it was because she was _intimidating_. Ruffnut was more honest, saying that she looked like she’d punch out anyone who tried to talk to her while she was on her path to world domination. She always thought it was something purer, something deeper, that she radiated ‘happily taken’ from every pore. 

And you know what? Maybe being hit on is reason enough. Maybe that isn’t as selfish and petty as it feels. Maybe she wants a few random people on the internet to see her picture and send her a cheesy message, and maybe she can just reinvigorate all of that ambition in the direction of being internet desirable. Five-year plan: likeability, with or without dignity. 

The front door swings open and she clicks ‘finished’ without thinking about it, slamming her laptop shut like she can hide what she’s been doing all day. No, Ruff, not mindlessly browsing the internet for 8 hours again, not at all. Astrid Hofferson: Furthering Society from Her Couch in her Favorite Slipper socks. 

That’s a medical school essay. 

“Your ass grown into the couch yet?” Ruffnut hangs her jacket on the hook by the door, stumbling as she slips out of her work shoes and drops her purse on the floor. She looks very _professional_ these days, all slacks and sensible blouse, and Astrid bets 18-year-old Ruffnut—with her nose ring and safety pinned jeans—would be horrified. (18-year-old Astrid is jealous and considering growing up in to another, entirely more successful human being.)

“I haven’t watered it, so I think I’m alright.” Astrid rolls her eyes, rocking onto her feet and stretching her arms over her head. Things pop that shouldn’t pop in anyone under fifty and Ruffnut watches her as she traipses to the kitchen, like she does this all the time and not just for show to prove she can move when someone’s watching. 

“Did you talk to your parents about the lease?” 

“Jumping right in? No, hey Astrid, how was your day?”

“It expires on the first, and Snot is more than willing to take over.” 

Right. Rub it in. Ruffnut’s happy relationship with her happy boyfriend who wants to happily move in with her. 

“I haven’t actually decided yet.” Astrid can’t quite hide the spite in her voice and Ruffnut scoffs. 

“Well, maybe that would be your decision if you, you know, got a job.” 

“I won’t have time to work during med school.” 

“Yeah, and you aren’t in med school. Unless University of Pheonix has online classes in surgery now or something.” Ruffnut’s face softens and Astrid hates it. The whole reason she stayed with Ruffnut after…everything, is Ruff never looked at her differently. Ruff bought her shots and told her she could do better, even though she was lying through her teeth. Thorston’s don’t pity, they berate, and Astrid would prefer the lecture right now, to be honest. “Did you do _anything_ today? Like, anything at all?” 

“I…aha! I started online dating. A profile exists,” she nods, and she hates how she feels better when Ruffnut smiles at her like she’s a puppy who finally pissed outside instead of in the potted plant. “It’s on the internet and has my picture and a completely normalized description of my interests. And it says I’m open to casual sex.” 

“Thank god,” Ruffnut ducks into her bedroom and comes out a moment later in her underwear, tugging a decidedly fancier than pajamas dress over her head. “I was starting to think you traded your sex drive to Satan for world class couch potato skills.” 

“Where are you going?”

“Oh,” Ruffnut brushes her hair out over her shoulder with her fingers, “Snot’s friend from work is having some party at this bar.” 

“Oh…does…does this mean you’re not going to cook dinner?” She knows it’s bad when she’s asking it, knows it’s pathetic and that she’d be ashamed if she had any shame left. Which she doesn’t. Obviously. Because her picture is on the internet affiliated with the phrase ‘casual sex’. 

“And here I was _proud_ of you for two seconds,” Ruffnut sits down on the couch, pulling on a pair of tights. “You could come with me, you know. Maybe Snot could hook you up.” 

“Nah, I should probably get back to my application.” 

“I didn’t realize you were so _scared_ of leaving the apartment.” Ruffnut’s goading taps on a singular spark still struggling for life somewhere in Astrid’s chest and she frowns, picking at the frayed edge of her tee-shirt. 

“I’m not _scared_. I’m just…” she sighs, a hiss of air between clenched teeth. “I’m not ready to meet the next Handsome McAsshole. I was going to let the internet do that part for me.”

“Look, Astrid.” Ruffnut grabs her hands, holding them too tightly and jerking Astrid to sit down beside her. “Not every Handsome is going to be a McAsshole. And to be fair, it took you six years to learn that about the last one, so what harm could one night do? Snotlout can set you up with one of his dumb, pretty friends, you can get some of this belated teenage angst out of your system and finish the application tomorrow.” 

“Since when are you the reasonable one?” Astrid rests her forehead on Ruffnut’s shoulder. 

“Come on. Go wash your hair, no one is going to sleep with you pre-shower.” 

“What? You aren’t feeling this right now?” Astrid points between them, “you aren’t feeling this insane tension? I swear, Ruff, if we just stayed home and got comfortable—”

“Whoa!” Snotlout opens the door, face split with a giddy smile as he holds his hands out in front of him. “Did I just interrupt something? Do you want me to leave? Or do you want me to stay? I always knew you’d pull something like this eventually, Astrid.”

“Shut up, Snotlout, I’m seducing your girlfriend.” 

“She’s coming with us,” Ruffnut stands, bending down to kiss Snotlout on the cheek and walking to the bathroom. “Tell her she needs to wash her hair.” 

Snotlout shrugs like he doesn’t have a choice in the matter, “but make it quick. It’s only open bar until midnight.” 

00000

Half a stressful hour later Astrid’s scalp is still slightly damp from Ruffnut’s impatient blow-drying, but it feels good to be outside, better than she’d admit out loud. Snotlout and Ruffnut are talking about their days with a companionable, _enviable_ comfort, holding hands as they walk three feet ahead of her down the sidewalk. It used to be a different trio, and the irony doesn’t escape Astrid. 

She and her fiancé used to take Ruffnut out when she would rather stay at home with her brother and prank his roommate. Back when Ruffnut was still so shy and awkward around them, and Astrid was still jealous in that property-claiming way she used to have. 

Ruffnut and Snotlout walk into the bar together with a wave at the bouncer, but when Astrid tries to follow, the man stops her with a beefy hand on her arm. 

“Can I see some ID?” 

“I’m a girl,” Astrid flicks her hair like she used to at nineteen, when her fake said she was 37 and she only pulled it out as an absolute last resort. 

“I can see that, ID?” The bouncer softens slightly, glancing at her friends. “Look, it’s just my job, you look kind of young. It’s a compliment.” 

“Fine,” Astrid rummages through her coat pockets, finding a wrinkled twenty she shoved in on the way out the door and…and no ID. “Dammit.”

“How did you lose your ID? You don’t go anywhere,” Ruffnut shivers in the drafty doorway of the bar, her arm coiling more tightly around Snotlout’s and holding him more closely to her. 

“Come on,” Astrid pushes her bangs off of her forehead, turning to face the bouncer. “Look. Wrinkles. I’m old enough to have wrinkles. That means something doesn’t it?”

“Astrid—” Ruffnut’s eyes widen and Astrid hates how her best friend developed a capacity to be embarrassed just as Astrid lost the rest of hers.

“Look, there’s a twitchy vein there. Twenty-two solid years of stress, throbbing right there, you see it?” She turns slightly, and he’s standing there behind her, looking sheepish and taller than she remembers. Cleaner cut. His once wild hair neatly slicked back. 

“Hey, Astrid.” 

“Hey, Eret,” she nods, stepping aside slightly, like she always has for him when he wants to get past her. Not that she’s bitter. That’s ridiculous. 

“I…I heard you were doing well.” 

“Yeah, from who?” 

“Uh,” he doesn’t make eye contact. He puffs up. He reminds her of nothing more than a middle school boy pretending he doesn’t _want_ to dance. Her heart aches, a deep, numbing ache she thought she was done with. The kind that makes her want to drown in ice cream and write her admissions essay on curing chronic chest pains by advising absolute abnegation of all emotional bonds. “I was just saying that to be nice—”

“Yeah,” she cuts him off, because a line seems to be forming around them, and the last thing Astrid wants is an audience. “I think there’s a girl trying to get around you—”

“Oh!” He puffs up again, bigger, proud this time, and she recognizes the situation more clearly. She’s the girl at the middle school dance that he doesn’t want to dance with. The petite redhead beside him is the one who convinced him all that cootie nonsense was bullshit. “This is Claire. And Claire, this is Astrid, we used to be—we used to date.” 

“Ouch,” Astrid laughs out loud, looking to the bouncer to back her up, “do you see why I need a drink?”

“We’ll see you later,” Eret drags his date around them and into the bar, giving Ruffnut the most awkward ‘hey, how are you?’ nod in the history of existence. 

“We didn’t know he was going to be here,” Ruffnut blurts, dragging Snotlout back outside. “I wouldn’t have asked you to come if I thought he was going to be here—”

“What is happening to me?” Astrid looks at the bouncer again, like she has to validate herself, like she can validate herself. “I was top of my class for my entire life! I won awards for breathing! I had this great fiancé and he remembered my birthday and I was the successful one. It was always ‘why can’t they all be more like Astrid?’ And now I can’t even get into a bar! I’m regressing. I’m tobogganing down Everest and…” That’s an image that makes her stop, and she wonders where all her focus went. Whether it fell out with everything else. “And I’m a loser. And he’s out with someone else, like nothing happened.” 

“We didn’t know he would be here.” 

“Yeah, whatever.” Astrid feels hollow, like someone poked a finger through the life-plan shaped hole in her chest and reminded her how empty and stupid and painful it is. She clears her throat. “Not your fault. Snotlout is obviously so popular you guys couldn’t keep track.” 

“Don’t let this happen, Astrid,” Ruffnut steps forward, “don’t let him push your buttons like that. Look, you know what you should do? You should go home and get on that dating site, and find someone to hook up with. Just…get back on the horse.” 

“I doubt many horses have profiles,” Astrid jokes because she doesn’t know what else to do, she just knows that people laughed with her long after they cried with her. “That whole hooves thing makes it a bit hard to use an app.” 

“See? On the internet, that could be a pickup line. Just go get on your computer, and find a cute guy, and hook up with him.” 

“It’s not that easy,” Astrid snaps, “you can’t just order it. There’s no number to call for no strings attached sex, no thirty-minute delivery policy.” 

“You can too order it, you’re hot and you have the internet. Just post a bikini picture and take your pick,” Ruffnut looks at the bouncer. “Right? It’s that easy. Hot girl and internet.” 

“You are hot,” the bouncer shrugs. “I’d swipe right.” 

“I was counting on you, dude.” Astrid shakes her head. “You were supposed to be on my side. I’ll have you know I was planning on spending a lot of money inside drinking my feelings away.” 

“It’s an open bar,” he sighs, “and I still can’t let you in without ID.”

“All of you are giving me trust issues,” Astrid points to the three of them, her finger lingering on Snotlout. “Get Ruffnut home safe, and remember. Thin walls, buddy. Thin walls.”

“You won’t even be there,” he calls after her as she stomps back up the street towards home. 

“Fat chance of that,” she grumbles, kicking a piece of ice off of the sidewalk and watching it shatter.

00000

Astrid opens her computer to fifty likes and three messages. She opens the first one, swears at the hellishly detailed penis on her screen, and goes to pour herself a glass of wine. The other two messages are penises too. One attached to a shirtless guy, but still, penis. Maybe it is like ordering takeout. You can always do it, but the pictures on the menu make you change your mind. 

But she’s still thinking about Eret, and his sheepish smile, and the way he was so friendly and different and awful compared to the bad boy college freshman who took her to prom. Her parents used to hate his earring. He used to play the radio so loud she could feel the music in her chest while she thought about how perfectly he fit into her future. 

“I need to get laid,” she says it out loud like it’ll mean more that way. “That’ll wash it all away. I’ll get laid, and it won’t be a big deal, and everything will go back to normal.” 

Two more messages show up in quick succession, one ‘hey’ and one ‘hey, bitch’. She deletes the ‘hey, bitch’, barely resisting temptation to tell them off and answers the ‘hey’ with a greeting of her own. They send back a picture. It’s a penis. Great.

Maybe she needs to go find a guy, maybe this works better that way. She clicks on guys in her area and sets the filter to ‘within five miles’ and ‘online now’. It feels like online shopping on one of those facebook advertised website where the cute twelve dollar dresses have descriptions like ‘one size fits fish’ except the risk is bigger and the grammar is worse. 

It’s an hour and two glasses of wine before a profile catches her eye.

He liked her, and his username made her laugh for some reason so she clicked on his page. 

His profile made her laugh again, so she liked it, and then because she has literally nothing to lose, she messages him first. When he responds, it’s a word and not a terrifying image link. 

No. And he seemed so normal. No. She clicks on the link because she’s a masochist and her laughter comes out with an ungainly snort. 

  


This is banter. She can do banter. She’s not feeling up for conversation, but she could just…go back and forth with someone until they had sex. That’s doable, distanced. Probably just what the doctor ordered. 

It takes her three tries to write her next message. ‘Do you want to have sex’ makes her sound like she’s trying to give him digital syphilis, and ‘would you want to hang out sometime’ makes it sound like she’s looking for something more than a less than miserable night with a funny guy. She types out her third try and hits send before she can second guess herself. 

Look at him, offering to meet in public. Almost an internet gentleman. 

  
  


Shit. What if he’s a computer virus. He’s been so normal. Is that how internet psychos lure in random girls? Code a computer to act normal? It’s the opposite of ‘hot girls in your area want to bang’ that apparently works so well on teenage boys, so…

Plus, there’s the whole thing where he could be luring her to his murder den. Not that she couldn’t take him, because she could, probably, but why risk it? 

  


The screen is black for a second and then ‘princessoutpost’ is requesting a video chat. She falters for a second, chewing on her lip and wondering just how truly stupid this is. 

Very. She’s never done anything stupid, but in the moment? It feels so much better than doing nothing. 

She clicks accept and a guy comes into view. 

He looks like his picture, a little bigger, obviously, a little geekier somehow when he moves. His hair looks dark in the shitty resolution, but his eyes are greener than she would have imagined, piercing beneath strong brows. 

“Hey.” He frowns, his cheeks tinged pink, “you’re actually that pretty. Wow.” 

Astrid tucks her hair behind her ear, “uh, thanks.” 

“So. Right. This is my apartment,” he picks up his computer and swivels it around to show a relatively clean, small space. There are no discernible secret passageways to murder dens or blood stains on the floor and Astrid finds herself even more nervous because she doesn’t have an easy way out. 

And scarier than that, maybe she doesn’t want one. Maybe she wants a one-night-stand in all of its messy, storied glory. Maybe she wants a walk of shame and to feel twenty-two and not forty and failed for a few hours. 

“Do I pass the test? I hid all of my Ted Bundy fan club paraphernalia really well.” 

She likes his face. She likes the way he winces at his own jokes, sees a reflection of her own bad verbal decisions there. 

“Nothing murder-y that I can see,” she bites her lip and nods, pretending to take a moment to decide even though she already has. “Plus, I think I could take you, if I had to.” 

“I don’t doubt it,” he flexes a bicep. “So…are we doing this?” 

“Yeah,” she nods, “but just so you know, I haven’t done anything like this before so…”

“Me either,” he shakes his head, and it’s like he can’t stay still when he talks. His shoulders are constantly twitching, little animated shrugs that make her think that he talks with his hands. He moves too fast for the internet connection, pixels of him freezing in illogical frames. “So I’ll see you in a while?” 

“Yeah, I have your address.” They say bye and she shoves her laptop away from her, clapping her hand over her forehead and draining her glass of wine. “I can’t believe I’m doing this. A booty call with a stranger, you’ll be a rebel yet, Hofferson.” 

“I don’t think it hung up right,” the voice comes from her laptop and she swears. 

“TV. No—I’ll be there in a bit. Shut up.” She slams her laptop closed and starts looking for her boots. 


	2. Chapter 2

Astrid wakes up in a bed that isn’t hers. The sheets feel wrong, crisper cotton than she likes, and the light is coming from the wrong angle. The light itself is wrong too, fuzzy and gleaming, more of a glare than a source and she sits up onto her elbows, looking around the room with itchy eyes.

Right. She had a one-night stand. She met some guy on the internet and went to his place exclusively for sex and she got what she wanted and the whole thing has her feeling momentarily empowered. Awkward and empowered, as she spots her bra hanging from the footboard. A bit cold and uncomfortable, like she slept on her neck wrong, but still empowered. 

The sheets shift across her lap and she looks at the guy next to her. He’s snoring slightly, his skinny shoulders shifting under soft cotton tee-shirt she doesn’t remember him putting back on. It hits her all at once that she doesn’t remember his name, which he confessed like a secret the night before as they made out clumsily on the way to his bed. H-something. Fuck. She can’t exactly call him princessoutpost, she doesn’t even know how she’d pronounce it without spaces. 

He looks younger when he’s asleep, the pure, pale light finding freckles on his cheeks and a softness under his jaw. He’s not frowning either, that look of cultivated concentration that was almost funny the night before, like he was pretending to be clinical. Paging Dr. H-something to the bedroom.

She snorts at her own joke, glancing at him to make sure he didn’t move. She looks at his face for another moment, waiting to feel something. Hope. Anger. Embarrassment. Anything but a lingering residue of last night’s physicality, the sexual cottonmouth of a booty call hangover.

She doesn’t, and it makes her smile. He’s a funny guy that did her a favor, and now she wants to get home and shower. 

She creeps around the room, collecting her clothes and getting dressed, wincing at every mumbled snore from the bed. It’s good one night stand etiquette, isn’t it? Leaving first thing, no fanfare, no ‘hey, are you going to pretend you’ll call me?’ dance. She even left her boots by the front door the night before, like the excellent house guest she is. If people rated booty calls like ebay sellers, she’d get a hundred percent. 

There should be a place for that on the dating site. Gets up early, doesn’t track mud in. 

H-something shifts and lets out a particularly loud snore as she reaches for the front door and she pauses, feeling a little guilty. He did give her something, no matter how fleeting and strange, and a nagging voice in the back of her mind—one that sounds suspiciously, _disturbingly_ like her mother—suggests leaving some sort of thank you note. It’s only polite. It makes her feel very mature, being so _polite_ about this. 

There’s a pad of paper by the fridge, but no pen, and she pulls her eyeliner out of her purse, holding the cap between her teeth as she scrawls on the top page:

_Thanks for last night. I had fun. Great apartment!_

_xx Astrid_

She pins it to the fridge and looks at it for a moment. It looks like something only someone else could have written. Someone casual, someone who makes snap decisions and goes with the flow she’s always swum against. This was all too easy, and she wonders, momentarily if she’s _ready_. Ready to get back out there, ready to meet new people and make new mistakes and _try_. 

And she’s in such a good mood when she reaches again for the door that of course something bad has to happen. The burglar alarm she didn’t notice starts beeping and asking for a code, and when she tries 1111 it just beeps louder, counting down from fifteen seconds. 

“Shit,” she snatches the note off of the fridge and tosses it in an empty wastepaper basket underneath a table covered in mail, kicking her shoes off and running towards the bedroom. She just manages to slide under the covers, coat and all, when the alarm goes off, the blaring sound jarring H-something awake with a startled yelp. 

Fuck, he’s awake and she doesn’t know his name. And fuck she’s still here. Fuck. 

“Wha?” He fumbles around at the edge of the bed, holding something long and metal in the air like a bat. But it’s not a bat, it’s wearing a shoe and it’s an artificial leg. 

What?

“Is that a burglar?” Astrid fakes a yawn and stretches, a headache blooming between her eyebrows, pulsing with every blare of the alarm. 

“Did you sleep in your coat?” He frowns at her, sleep rumpled, his hair sticking in all directions. 

“I got cold,” she shifts against a rivet of her jeans, reminded how uncomfortable she is from her mad dash. “Go get the burglar. Go.” 

He turns away from her, swinging his legs over the side of the bed, leaning forward and fitting the artificial leg into place. 

What? 

How did she not notice that last night? She runs through it all in her head, trying to register some memory of a prosthetic leg and coming up empty. 

The alarm cuts out and he stumbles back into the room, bleary eyed and appearing not to notice her at all. 

“Hey, so I had fun last night—” she starts, cutting off abruptly when he flops back into bed next to her and starts snorting almost immediately. “Goddammit.” 

She pokes his shoulder. He rolls away, shrugging the covers over his shoulder. She shakes him. He laughs in his sleep, pressing his face into the pillow. 

“Ok, then,” she sits up, thinking about shoving him out of bed. It’s what she wants to do, what a long-suffering, always stifled, mischievous part of her wants to do. It’s not what hyper-casual, booty-call master Astrid would do. 

Plus, there’s the whole leg thing…

God, she hates herself for going there. It’s just another reason she’s never going to get into medical school. _Why do you want to be a doctor?_ ‘Well I don’t really know, I just want some fancy medical text to tell me whether it’s politically correct to shove an amputee out of a bed to wake him up after a one night stand. Oh, the library? Right. I’ll try there before forking over tuition money.’

An alarm clock on the end table closest to her goes off before she can overthink it any further, the Spice Girls ringing out almost as loudly as the burglar alarm and probably twice as effective, because what kind of common thief wants to get with anyone’s friends? H-something flops across her chest, clumsy and bony and surprisingly heavy as he smacks at the button, stopping the song mid-chorus. He looks up at her, brows furrowed like he’s entirely forgotten seeing her a few minutes ago, before rolling off of her and leaning up onto an elbow. 

“Uh, good morning.” 

“Some alarm you’ve got there,” she sits up, straightening her coat, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and wondering just how much small talk she has to make before he’ll give her the damn alarm code and she can make her clean escape. 

“S—I forgot to turn it off. I guess,” he looks a little more awake. A little more awkward. Like he’s fully taking in the situation, like he wasn’t lying when he said he didn’t do this often. 

“It’s cool,” Astrid tries again to channel the casual girl that wrote the failed fridge note. “So…I should probably be going…” 

“Is that what you usually do?” He’s smiling at her. 

No. He’s smirking. It’s clearly a _smirk_ and her entire face feels hot. 

“What is that supposed to mean?” 

“Nothing,” he sits up, turning away from her so quickly it’s like she burned him. He tugs a pair of sweatpants on over his boxers and stands, stretching his arms over his head. 

“Because I told you last night I’ve never done this before.” 

“Yeah,” he shrugs, nonchalant. Like this was easy for him. Like he’s actually as casual as she’s pretending to be. “That’s what you said.” 

Everything about his tone rubs her the wrong way. Everything about how his lips look fuller when he quirks them, how he looks like he _won_ something. 

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” he holds his hands up in _casual_ surrender, like he’s not really sorry, like he’s never been sorry in his life. “I was just wondering if you had a protocol—”

“What? Like I do this so much I have a written procedure for morning after one night stands?” She crosses her arms and snorts, “if I didn’t know better, I’d say you were calling me a slut.” 

“Not at all,” he looks at the door, like he’s thinking about leaving, and she wishes she’d just run for it and let him think she was kidnapped. “I’m calling you a girl who invited herself over to a guy’s apartment in the middle of the night to have sex with him, I don’t think there’s even a word for that—”

“Hey!” She should have shoved him out of the bed. 

“Whoa, joking.” He looks honestly apologetic, green eyes wide, young again, a dumb kid who said something idiotic. She bets that works for him, a doe eyed look replacing apology whenever he says something awful. 

“It’s not funny.” 

“It’s sort of funny,” he runs his hand through his hair. “Look, I make a delicious bowl of oatmeal with a smiley face made out of jelly and it’s not slutty at all.” 

“Stop saying that!” She snaps, and it’s like that last fight with Eret. When he just kept saying ‘I’m done trying, I’m done trying, I’m done trying’ and she wanted to wrap duct tape around his dumb head until he forgot how to form the words. 

“What? Slut?” 

“You know what!” It’s too much and she snaps all at once, whirling on her heel and storming towards the door. She slips into her boots, ignoring her wrinkled sock. “Do you even know how irritating you are?” 

“You didn’t seem so irritated last night.” 

She can picture his cocky smirk and she whirls on him, swinging her purse over her shoulder. 

“Don’t believe everything you hear,” she sneers, “I spent enough time online to know how fragile the male ego is.” 

“Goodbye, Astrid,” he waves at her, a chipper, bitter wave, “I’ll see you never.” 

“Yeah, H…” she stumbles, and she hates how he looks like he’s winning. 

“Hiccup,” he fills in for her, arms crossed. She can’t believe she liked bantering with him the night before. 

“That’s not a name, that’s…a bodily function,” she rips open the door and slams it shut behind her, half-running down the stairs. 

The snow is piled up to the doorknob, so white it hurts to look at it. Astrid looks at the stairs behind her, furrowing her brow and throwing her whole weight against the door all at once, her feet sliding on the cold tile floor. The door budges maybe half an inch, the snow outside deceptively heavy for the fluffy way it wafts to the ground. 

The one morning she doesn’t check the weather forecast. The one night she doesn’t spend at home. 

“Come on, stupid door,” Astrid grumbles under her breath, throwing her shoulder against the door again, gritting her teeth and pretending it’s the last six months of accumulated bullshit preventing her from getting outside. 

“…how am I doing? Well, I woke up next to…a komodo dragon trapped in a hot girl body, and she yelled at me, and that’s how I’m doing.”

It’s _Hiccup_ and Astrid crushes herself to the door, pulling her phone out of her pocket and pretending to be interested in the screen. She should turn around and continue yelling at him. Her exit was too splendid to waste. 

“It’s like…a dusting, Mom. You know people here are babies about snow. I’m fine. Oh…” Hiccup’s slightly uneven gait comes to a sudden halt and Astrid squints her eyes shut, wishing it was last night, at home, on her couch with a bottle of wine, joking about a one-night stand. That was better. There’s something to be said for wishing instead of doing. “Hey uh, I’ve got to call you back. I’m fine though. Seriously. I don’t have to go to work until Wednesday anyway, because of the holiday…No. I’ll call you. The storm is messing with…yeah, I’ll text. Ok.” 

Astrid exhales and pushes on the door one more time, hoping for a miraculous avalanche that might clear some of the drift outside. 

“You Colorado people are surprisingly pathetic when it comes to snow.” Hiccup walks up beside her, dropping his laundry basket on the ground and gesturing for her to move. She wants to say that she’s probably twice as strong as he is, that if she can’t get the door open there’s no way that he can. 

“Hmm,” is all that comes out and she crosses her arms, feeling grubby and embarrassed and awkward. She didn’t used to feel awkward. Awkward didn’t used to be part of her vocabulary. 

“This is nothing, back home, we’ve got twice this month nine months a year.” The last word turns into a groan as he throws his skinny shoulder against the door, the blue vein in the side of his neck standing out. He looks out of the window and whistles, “that’s actually…that’s some snow.” He kicks the bottom of the door and looks at her like she’s the firing squad. It makes her feel powerful, smug even, until she realizes that the alternative to being nice is camping out in the stairwell of a strange apartment building.

“A little bit of it.” She bites her lip, sighing around her front teeth, “I’m sorry about…all that. Upstairs.” 

“You’re just being nice to me for my couch.” It almost looks like some part of his oversized head might be upset, and it’s almost enough for Astrid to feel almost bad. “You know, the couch right upstairs, in the building surrounded by three…” he looks out of the window and cringes, “four and a half feet of snow.” 

“To be fair, I am being nice so I don’t have to camp out in the stairwell.” 

“At least you’re honest.” He shakes his head, running his hand through messy hair she doesn’t want to think about. He fumbles his keys from the front pocket of his jeans and hands them to her, “it’s the thick brass one, apartment 4B, in case you lost count while you were sprinting away from me. I’m going to put this laundry in and I’ll be up in a minute.” 

“Thanks,” she takes the keys, turning them over in her hands. “And I meant it about—”

“Don’t grovel, I’m only letting you back in for the view. I’m snowed in too, I might as well look at something interesting.” 

“You’re an ass, you know that?” 

“I’m also a smart mouth and great hair. I’ll be up in a minute.” 

00000

“This is my punishment.” Astrid pokes her spoon into the bowl of oatmeal, anything but hungry. 

“Wow, don’t spare my feelings or anything.” Hiccup doesn’t even look at her, eating faster than his frame would indicate he could, his spoon scraping near constantly against the side of his bowl.

“Not…” She pushes the bowl away from her, drumming her fingertips on the edge of the table. “The storm is my punishment for slutting it up.” 

“So now—never mind.” He crosses his arms, looking at her with irritating trepidation, like there’s a million thoughts in his head that could fill the uncomfortable silence, but he prefers letting her suffer.

She’s never been good with silence, not really. She always feels the need to hum or fill the space with something. Rooms are too big when they’re quiet, like the walls recede until it’s a practical maze to get out. 

“What?” She crosses her own arms, feeling naked under his gaze even though she’s still wearing her coat. Taking it off means getting comfortable, means accepting she’s going to be stuck here—here, in Hiccup’s apartment, the scene of her first one-night stand and her miserable, failed storm out—for a while. “Do I have something on my face?” 

“I’m just trying to figure out how you’re so important that the weather is punishing you for ‘slutting it up’.” His air quotes around her borrowed phrase make it sound dumber than it already did and she glares at him. 

“If you must know, I’m pretty sure it’s my uncle,” she says, looking down at her hands. “If he’s watching he’s probably pretty pissed at most of my life choices right now.” 

“Your dead uncle caused a blizzard to punish you?” He raises an eyebrow and she wishes he looked less blasé, that he’d pretend to be sorry for her loss like everyone else does. 

“Do I need to translate everything I say into asshole?” 

He laughs, “I’m bilingual. Fluent in asshole, proficient in superstitious nonsense.” 

The corner of her lip twitches in spite of her best intentions and Astrid stares carefully at the brass zipper of her coat, counting notches. She’s up to fifty when Hiccup sighs and rubs his hands through his hair. His chair squawks against the floor as he scoots back too quickly, kicking his keels onto the table. 

“Maybe we could pretend this is just the weather and not your mystical, spiteful uncle.” He talks like he has an audience, “and hell, maybe we could pretend we’re just two strangers snowed in together, which we are—”

“We’re hardly strangers.”

“I don’t know your phone number or full last name or what you look like in the daytime when you’re not downright murderous—”

“We had _sex_ ,” Astrid scoffs. “I’ve seen your penis, you’ve implied I’m a slut. We can’t just pretend those things didn’t happen.” 

“I think you’re underestimating the power of wishful thinking.” 

“Those things are too big to just wishful think away.” She glares at him and he laughs, his expression full of a carefree sort of mirth at her annoyance. 

“Did you just call my penis big?” 

“What—”

“No, you actually called it ‘too big’. I can’t say _that’s_ a complaint I’ve had before—”

“No, I called the fact that I’ve seen your penis big. The implication of your penis is big.” She rolls her eyes, wishing away the heat rising in her cheeks.

“Well, it’s still nice to hear.” He straightens his face, sitting up straight and leaning towards her, hand outstretched. “Considering the alternative is to fight until one of us jumps out the window, I’m going to try and start over. Hi, I’m Hiccup, nice to meet you.”

She stares at his hand and mulls through her options, hoping she missed something, that there’s some magical third solution that will transport her to her bedroom at home where she can hide under the covers until spring, a nouveau groundhog for the twenty first century. She reaches out and gives him her firmest, most business like handshake, like this is the weirdest job interview in the world. 

“I’m Astrid,” 

“Pretty name, Astrid, what do you do for a living?” 

“No,” she shakes her head, shoving her hands right back in her coat pockets where they should have stayed. “That’s what we’re doing? Asking offensive questions?” 

Jumping out the window is looking better by the second. 

“That’s an offensive question?” He raises his eyebrows, like she should care about his judgement, and she scowls at him.

“No offensive questions.”

“Fine,” he balances his spoon on a finger, and there’s a second when she thinks he’s going to torture her with the silence again. “Fine. Inoffensive questions…hmm…inoffensive, not my forte. Do…do you like cats?” 

“I do,” she nods too enthusiastically, because it’s easy and she remembers his dating profile well enough to know that it’s a _right_ answer. “I do like cats. You have a cat, don’t you?” 

“Yeah,” he looks around the room, under the table. “He’s around here somewhere. He doesn’t really like strangers.” 

He nods slowly, like he’s waiting for her to continue the conversation about a cat that isn’t here. She’s never had a cat, she doesn’t know anything about cats. She can’t think of anything but a million mean comments about how his cat would be more used to people if his personality weren’t literally repulsive, but the idea of bickering all day makes her exhausted in advance. She stands up too suddenly, her own chair squeaking across the floor. 

“Can I use your bathroom?”

“I’ll allow it,” he gestures over his shoulder, “kidding, I just—”

“Yeah,” she shrugs her coat off and leaves it on the back of her chair. “You think you’re hilarious. I get it.” 

It’s the quintessential bachelor bathroom, toilet seat left up amid a general air of grime. The shower curtain is clean, at least, and she doesn’t hate the stack of magazines in a basket in the corner. She thinks about camping out in here, in private, and wonders if it’s better or worse than the stairwell. 

One magazine is open on top of the rest and she picks it up, flicking through to the page that most naturally falls open. 

**5 Types of Girls You Meet Online Dating**

“Ugh,” she groans to herself, expecting some douchey explanation that girls on the internet _want_ random guys’ shirtless selfies, but type two catches her eye. 

**Damaged Girl Getting Back on the Horse**

_Maybe the last guy cheated on her, or dumped her over text, but either way, she’s crying inside while pretending she’s eager to get into your pants. She claims she wants something casual, but is not so lowkey hoping you’ll prove the last guy crazy and sweep her off her—_

Astrid tears the page out and wads it into a ball, shoving it into the toilet bowl and flushing. 

Ass. She knew he was an ass, and now she has unequivocal proof that he was skulking online for some damaged girl to screw over. It hurts more than it should, like the whole world has been keeping something from her. Like she’s been walking around with a target stamped on her forehead—take me, I’m damaged—but no one thought to mention it to her. 

Hiccup has moved to the living room, where half the limited floor space is taken up by a rickety old ping pong table. He’s hitting ball after ball into a bucket on the far side of the table and she flops onto the couch, wishing she’d thrown headphones into her slut bag the night before.

“Astrid!” He almost yells and she glares at him. 

“What?” 

“Uh,” he points to a slick of water flowing under the bathroom door. 

“Shit!” She jumps to her feet, pulling off her socks and running towards the mess. The toilet is clogged, because she’s literally the unluckiest human on the planet, and she fumbles with the valve on the back to stop the overflowing water. 

“Here, let me—”

“No!” She shoves him back out of the bathroom. If he finds that page, it’s like giving him the key to her Achilles’ heel, and she hates the thought of losing any more power or mystery in this shitty situation. “No, you’re just rub it in my face. I can handle this. Where’s your plunger?” 

“Right over—oh, fuck. I loaned it to someone.” 

“Smart,” she rolls her eyes, pullin ga stack of towels from the shelf above the toilet and trying to sop up the lake on the floor. “Why would you loan someone your plunger?” 

“He asked, I didn’t think—”

“You can stop there, I think you just summarized your life.” 

He snorts halfway through feigning hurt, his hand clapped over his heart, “ok, don’t worry about it. I’ll look at it in a bit.” 

“You’re uh…you’re letting me off that easy?” It feels wrong, like he should be teasing her, like he has about everything else. She wonders if Ruffnut is right and she’s looking for misery at this point, seeing adversaries where there are none.

“Shit happens,” he shrugs, and she doesn’t hate that wry grin quite as much as she wants to. “Sometimes literally.” 

She punches him in the shoulder and pushes past him to flop on the couch, trying not to look effected.


	3. Chapter 3

“Do you have service?” Astrid paces back and forth across Hiccup’s living room, pressing her phone screen repeatedly. “You were on the phone in the hallway.” 

“Yeah, but not anymore,” he waves his phone at her and she squints to see the little white x in the corner of his screen. “Plus, aren’t you watching the weather? There’s like another foot of snow outside.” 

Astrid glares at the window, her hand on her hip. 

“Can you stare down the clouds from _anywhere_ else in the room? You’re right between me in the TV.” Hiccup has a way of making himself comfortable. He looks lazy on the couch in a way she doesn’t think she fully understands, like he doesn’t have a care in the world. It’s almost a structured sort of lazy and she imagines him _practicing_ it. 

She wants to be empathetic, to see him as someone who was in the same situation as her last night, but the word _slut_ and his definitive tone from that morning still hang over her head. Ruffnut would say she’s holding onto it because she feels slutty. Well, Ruffnut would say that if she could fucking talk to her, if, you know, all the reception weren’t fucking stuck in a fucking blizzard. 

Astrid has never been patient. She doesn’t like waiting for people, doesn’t like twiddling her thumbs while other people’s shit falls into place. 

She doesn’t like that she’s smart enough to recognize the hypocrisy of the fact that everyone she knows has been waiting on her shit for months now. 

“You’re sure you don’t have service?” 

“I’m sure.” 

“You could check your phone again,” she crosses her arms. 

“Checked it,” he doesn’t move, staring at her—through her—like he can see the TV through her torso and the thick smog of her irritation. 

“You’re an asshole.” 

He rolls his eyes, running a hand through messy auburn and pointing a carefully lazy hand towards the bedroom, “sometimes it’s better in there.” 

Astrid has the distinct feeling that he’s trying to get rid of her, but a few minutes away from his smug face sounds good even if it’s all his plan and she has to stare at that bed. She perches at the foot of it and stares at the ‘no service’ on the corner of her phone screen. 

Eret wasn’t her first, and she always thought the idea of _virginity_ was stupid anyway, some mythical wealth assholes made up to be stolen and devalue. But he was her most important, her only important, and Hiccup was her first since.

It shouldn’t matter but it does. 

Her phone startles her when I buzzes, loud against the button of her oversized flannel shirt, the least sexy thing she owns and the perfect thing to wear on a practical, modern, self-determined one night stand. 

‘ _have fun last night ;) ;)’_ Ruffnut’s text lures a single, tentative bar to her screen and she fumbles to call her so fast she almost drops it, pressing the phone to her ear and holding her breath. 

“Come on, come on,” she mutters under her breath, waiting for the ring on the other end. It happens and she jumps to her feet, pacing in a tight little line on the rug by the foot of the bed, scuffing damp socks along the carpet. “Pick up, Ruff. Pick up, pick up, pick up…” 

“Hello?” Ruffnut picks up with a laugh, an indulgent, warm laugh that Astrid has ignored through their too thin walls what feels like a million times. “Snot, stop. Stop. I gotta get details.” 

Snotlout whines inarticulately on the other end and Astrid pushes her hair behind her ear. 

“I gotta talk fast, I have no idea how long my service is going to last.” 

“How was your one night stand?” Ruffnut sounds like the Cheshire cat, talking through her widely bared teeth. 

“You have to get me out of here, dude.” 

“What?” She seems to stop short. “I can’t see the building across the street. You know I love a death mission, but—”

“Snotlout is an EMT, can’t he get a helicopter and air-lift me to safety or something?” 

“He’s busy.” Ruffnut sighs, “it was that bad, huh? So bad you can’t bring your incorrigibly horny self to have leftovers for brunch?” 

“He’s a jerk,” Astrid should cup her hand over her mouth, should block the receiver, but she doesn’t care because it’s true and she’s stuck here and Hiccup could do with being taken down a few notches. She thought they were getting along better after he didn’t unnecessarily drag her for clogging the toilet, but there’s something about—well, something about everything about him that gets under her skin, like a splinter. “And this is horribly awkward and if I could get the goddamn door open I would swim all the way home through the snow and kick your scrawny ass—”

“If you need someone to yell at, go yell at jerk face, I’m busy.” 

Astrid pinches her nose, “please. Please come and get me.” 

“It’s a blizzard, babe.”

“I’ve got some sort of luck,” she sighs, rubbing her eyes. “I guess I can go work on my acting,” it’s mean and she knows it, knows that she should save the girl talk for a later day, a later day that feels like freshman year, tucked under a blanket together and giggling about things they hardly understood. 

“That bad, huh?” 

“Not bad just…fill my academy award with tequila, ok?” 

“I eagerly await the reviews from your next feature film, Ms. Hofferson.” Ruffnut giggles like Snotlout is tackling her, tickling her armpits, pressing her to the carpet and—oh. 

Astrid hangs up in a hurry and stuffs her phone in her pocket. 

“You got through.” 

She jumps, hand on her chest, because Hiccup is standing in the doorway like a creepy, lurking _lurker_ , his shoulder so easily tucked into the doorframe. 

“Roommate,” she holds up the phone by way of explanation. “I thought she’d be worried, but she’s just having an extended sleepover with her boyfriend.” 

“Lucky her.” 

“Scratch that, I didn’t think she’d be worried.” Astrid messes with her phone, her hair, her sleeves, anything other than looking into piercing green and wondering if he heard her. Of course he heard her, the walls are probably thin as all hell. His neighbors probably heard her entire spiel pursuing an Oscar for best orgasm attempt and she’s embarrassed for all the wrong reasons. “But at least she knows you didn’t murder me or anything now.” 

“Something tells me murdering you would be difficult.” He stands up, holding a hideous bong towards her. It’s green glass, normal enough except for the small plastic dragons glued to every square inch of it, some of their feet melted to the glass. “I’m going to take the edge off, care to join me?”

Astrid scoffs, rolls her eyes, because she might be unemployed and stranded at her first one night stand with the worst timing ever in the entire world, but she doesn’t need to add loser stoner to the list of her recent failures. 

“I’m good thanks.” 

“What? You’ve never smoked before?” 

“I have,” she pushes past him into the living room and flops onto the corner of the couch, staring at the TV like the white out on screen is more interesting than the one right outside the window. “I just don’t need to make any more mistakes right now.” 

“Ouch,” he scoffs, sitting next to her and picking a lighter up off of the table. “I think you could afford to chill out a little.” 

Astrid wants to say that chilling out is the last thing she needs. She can’t form the words and she rolls her eyes, tucking her feet under her, “Nice bong.”

“My friend made it,” Hiccup smiles, halfway authentic as he leans down and purses his lips across the top of it, striking the lighter and inhaling with a burble of bubbles. He holds his breath a moment and exhales a thick furl of creamy white smoke, “he’s a massive stoner.” 

“Really? I couldn’t tell.” She looks at the monstrosity out of the corner of her eye, the plastic dragons hissing and winding around the surface. It doesn’t smell bad, more loamy than skunky, like fresh churned garden dirt. 

“I like to think I inspire his creativity.” 

Astrid hates the way the corner of her mouth twitches, determinedly and entirely of its own volition. “Fine. I’m going to need it.” 

“That’s the spirit.” He passes her the bong with a grin, his hair curling up at the tips from the steam. 

00000

“Ok. Ok. Ok.” Astrid bounces the ping pong ball on her paddle, all of her concentration focused on the spot. “You asked what I did for a living.” 

“And quickly learned that was a massive mistake, your serve.” 

“I got a little _feisty_.” She steps back from the table and serves, hitting his return back easily. It bounces off of the very edge of the table and Hiccup catches it with the edge of his paddle, flinging it towards her side of the room. 

“You? Never.” 

“Ha, hilarious.” She plucks the ball from a dusty corner and starts bouncing it on her paddle again, “I do nothing. All the time. Every day.” She hits it towards him, “and last year, I used to be able to say I was a pre-med student, and it sounded sort of important. But then I graduated and now I’m nothing.” 

“You know, I think your profile said you were a pre-med student.” 

“Yeah, I made I a long time ago and I haven’t gotten around to it.” 

“You made it yesterday.”

Astrid sticks her tongue out at him and smacks the ball towards him, her arm flexing as she tries, clumsily, to put a spin on it. He steps out of its path and raises an eyebrow at her. 

“What? Do you want me to admit I lied?” She snorts, dropping her paddle on the table with a not quite satisfying enough thwack. She should have thrown it down. In fact, throwing things sounds fantastic, breaking things even better. It feels good for her inhibitions to be violent, chaotic, for so long the only thing she’s been inhibiting is eating more junk food while taking another nap. “Pre-med student sounds sort of impressive, you know? It sounded like I had a plan, but—“ It’s a fake complaint she’s used a million times, because it’s funny and relatable, “but my degree didn’t come with directions.” 

Hiccup smirks, the kind of smirk she wants to punch, the kind of smirk that a puppy smirks after it tears up a shoe but knows it’s too _cute_ to end up regretting it. 

“It did say _pre_ -med, right? As in…there should be a _post_. What do they call post-pre-med, Astrid? There’s a word for it, it’s just slipping my mind right now—”

“Shut up.” 

“Right! Medical school. Post-pre-med is just med.” 

“Do you want to lose more?” She points at the ping pong table, “or do we need to go find something you’re good at?” 

00000

Hiccup builds pillow forts like he’s following a schematic, which is impressive in and of itself, even if Astrid weren’t taking into account just how much pot they smoked. The blanket serving as the ceiling is purple and frayed, the holes in the weave like dark patches of sky while the Christmas lights they’ve strung inside are stars. Either Astrid is crazy, or Hiccup is purposefully crunching on pretzels to the beat of ice-ice-baby. It’s stuck in her head and she drums her foot on the ground. 

“So, I had to do the whole embarrassing sharing thing, what’s your deal? What do you do for a living that qualifies you to give me post-pre-med recommendations?” 

He shrugs, and she can hear it more than see it, his shoulders shifting against the mess of pillows underneath him. 

“I’m a junior level design engineer.” 

“Engineering, fancy. Sounds like you have your life together.” Bitterness and sarcasm sound the same through the fog of her ears. “Do you like it?” 

“You’re not supposed to like your job,” he scoffs, “I think that’s something our generation seems really confused about.” 

“Wow, how cynical of you.”

“Yeah, I’m cynical. Sometimes. But I also have an apartment and a ping pong table and I don’t have to lie on my online dating profile, so maybe pessimism works.” 

“Who hurt you?” She snorts, shifting to get comfortable and jostling her knee against the hard line of his prosthetic leg. 

Right. 

Shit. 

“I’m an asshole.” She can’t make her voice as loud as she wants it to be, it’s a tiny mutter in the warm space. 

“Yeah, but you’re hot too, so you can get away with it.” He sounds affectionate in a way she hasn’t heard from him, soft and warm in a way that can only be the pot. “Some of us have to pretend to be nice.” 

It’s the bathroom all over again. He should be calling her out as a horrible, insensitive bitch who makes inordinate fun of people with fake legs. But he’s not, he’s complimenting her in a gentle, sarcastic way that sounds authentic and making fun of himself to cover her oversight. 

She thinks…she thinks that maybe if they’d met under different circumstances, friendly circumstances, he might not be so annoying. 

“You’re quiet,” Hiccup pokes his foot into her side and she glares at it, his twisted sock stuck between two of his toes. “It’s a nice change. I should have gotten you high earlier.” 

“Ass,” she shoves on his leg, resituating herself. Her head is against his side and she can feel his heartbeat against her crown. “My dad used to smoke pot. Back when I was in high school. He thought it made him cool, like my friends would be his friends too.” 

“The cool parent curse,” Hiccup mutters, his fingers trailing slowly through her hair. His hands are never still, whether they’re stringing lights through a pillow fort or tossing a ping pong ball to himself. He works through the tangles in the ends of her hair, a slow sound of static filling the space between songs on the ancient record player in the corner. “That’s how my mom is.” 

“What? Did she flirt with all your high school friends? Girl talk with your prom date?” Astrid laughs, popping a handful of chocolate candy into her mouth and crunching slowly, loudly. 

“She wasn’t around for prom. Showed up at my dorm during my first semester of college, introducing herself and wanting to catch up.” Hiccup shifts to get comfortable, the muscles of his abdomen twisting sinuously against Astrid’s head. She pouts and shifts, resting her head fully on his stomach and looking up at his chin. The bottom of his jaw is pale and softer than it looks from the side and she counts the freckles half blurred by stubble. 

“When did she leave?”

“Before I could remember. I was still a baby, my dad doesn’t like to talk about it.” He drags his fingertips absently along her scalp, crunching on another pretzel, “but I was excited, you know, to have a mom. Until she wanted to party with me, buy me alcohol. She kept telling me who I was, how I was just like her. Now I feel like I take care of her most of the time.”

“My parents did that too. They acted like they thought it would be comforting, to just tell me who I was and where I was going and why, but really? Really I’m 22 and I have no fucking idea. I’ve never decided anything in my life.” 

“So your parents told you to come have a one-night stand on the eve of the biggest blizzard in the last century. Damn, parenting 101 expressly recommends against that, at least my mom read the baby books before abandoning me in my crib.” 

“God, you’re a sullen asshole,” Astrid laughs, rolling off of his stomach, onto her elbows. “Everyone’s parents are messed up. That’s like…the new normal.” 

“Do you always spend this much time worrying about being normal?” Hiccup leans onto his arm, his hair sticking to the blanket ceiling with static, and Astrid can’t help but notice the long, lean lines of him, the way his shirt wrinkles across his hipbone, a slip of pale skin above his belt. If she’d met him at that bar they wouldn’t let her into, maybe. If he’d been the dumb pretty friend. 

If he’d never opened his big, stupid, loud mouth. 

“Maybe you should try it some time.” 

“If I were normal, my pillow forts wouldn’t be so great,” he starts bobbing his chin to the music, slowly and unintentionally, just enough for the familiar beat to make its way fully into Astrid’s consciousness. It’s an old favorite. One she always goes back to, whenever she’s watching her uncle’s house. The blue cover with the faded name at the end of the stack. 

“You should turn this off,” the heavy, smoky feeling of her blood is suddenly overwhelming and her foot starts tapping on the floor. 

“Do you not like this song?”

“I love this song. This song is making me want to dance.”

His smile is genuine, and she hates him for it, hates how easy he is in this situation, like he’s always snowed in with strange girls who want to strangle him, “so dance.” 

“No, that’s a horrible idea.” 

“Scared I’m going to put your horrible dancing on youtube?” 

“No,” she leans back onto her hands and knees, her hips moving subconsciously to the beat, the familiar tune reminding her of dusty air and dawn light streaming through the east blinds, cracked just enough to see the pink of the sunrise. “I’m scared that if you see me dance you might start to like me, and you’ll start being nice, and following me around like a lost little puppy dog.” 

“Me? Nice?” His smile tilts in a lazy way that makes her itch to get out of here, to get her own air, her own space. To move and burn off some of this inexplicably nervous energy. 

“You haven’t seen me dance.” She ducks out of the pillow fort all at once, pretending she’s snowed in elsewhere, in her uncle’s basement. The sound of the microwave upstairs beeping as it heats up milk for hot cocoa, the fire crackling in the fireplace. She drifts easily into the motions, moving with the beat until the air feels less cold, her heartbeat less awkward in her chest. She doesn’t notice Hiccup peeking out of the corner of the fort, and even if she does, even if she spies the bright green of his eyes out of the corner of her gaze, she doesn’t let it stop her.


	4. Chapter 4

“I have a hypothetical question.” Astrid sets down her scissors, looking up from the snowflake she was cutting into a piece of printer paper. 

“I hypothetically have an answer.” 

“Ok, Schrödinger’s asshat, if I—if either of us, one of us, someone in this apartment had to use the restroom, how would that happen?” 

The toilet is still clogged, and as the junk food moves through her system and the foggy haze in her brain wears off, well…well, it’s starting to feel like the start of a situation.

“Are you opposed to the litterbox?” He snorts like a third grader and she rolls her eyes. 

“I might not be a lady, but I’m not shitting in a litterbox.” 

“So I guess the garbage disposal is out too?” 

A minute later they’re out in the hallway, knocking on his neighbor’s door. He leans in closer to the wood, knuckles rapping a bit more sharply.

“Mr. Johan, it’s me, Hiccup.” 

“Are you the creepy neighbor? Could he be hiding because you’re the creepy neighbor?” She rocks back and forth on her toes feeling like a first grader in line for the toilet. “Or is he the creepy neighbor? If he skins me I’m blaming you.” 

He laughs. 

“Don’t laugh at me, this isn’t funny.” 

“It’s sort of funny.”

“Look at my face,” she points to her chin, “do I look like this is funny? I’m panicking here.” 

“Mr. Johan!” He sighs when there’s no answer and Astrid looks both ways, catching sight of the mailbox on the far wall, full to bursting.

“Is that his mailbox?”

“Fuck,” Hiccup rubs his hand through his hair, auburn sticking up strangely at all angles. “Are you sure you’re too ladylike for the sink?” 

“I don’t want you calling me in a week blaming me for your death by e. coli.” 

“There are two problems with that,” he numbers on his fingers, “One, I would be dead and the one benefit of death is that I don’t have to call anybody, ever. And two, we would wash it down. With soap. And that would kill all the e. coli.” 

“Are there any other options?” She crosses her arms, cocks her hip, tries to be an impenetrable wall that won’t move for anything but an ideal solution. “No lobby bathroom, no latrine in the boiler room?” 

“Hmm,” he strokes his chin, an auburn shadow blooming across the sharp line of his jaw like he needs to shave. It’s fascinating in a way that distracts her from the mild panic blooming in her stomach and she wonders how often he needs to shave, what he looks like with shaving cream smoothed across his skin. Does he pretend to have a big white beard or is he minimalist and efficient? “I have an idea.” 

“If it’s the sink again I am going to punch you in the face.” 

“We could go out my window, up the fire escape, across the roof, down Mr. Johan’s fire escape and into his window.” 

“Great,” Astrid nods, “let’s do it.”

Hiccup changes into a ridiculous pair of long underwear and a green snowsuit that makes him look more marshmallow than man, but he gets off easy compared to the pink and blue one that he loans her. It’s suspiciously well-fitted, but hideously ugly and she debates playing blizzard cat burglar in her regular clothes as the poof of it nearly stops her from pulling her boots on. 

“Why do you have this again?” 

“Uhh,” he stumbles, hopping on one foot as he shoves a boot onto his prosthetic. “Grandma. Inheritance. The last thing I have left of her.”

“I can’t tell whether I’m honored or creeped out that you’re dressing me like your dead grandma.” The tasteless joke falls out of her mouth when she catches herself looking at the visible metal column of his leg for a moment too long. She wants to ask what happens. She can’ even be mad a herself for covering up the urge with sexy dead grandma jokes.

“You should be honored, she was a fox.” 

“You’re disgusting.” 

He winks at her, waving her into the bedroom. 

The window slides open surprisingly easily considering the feet of snow accumulated on the ledge, and they both climb out, holding ono each other’s bundled forearms for support as they get used to the bruising wind gusting against the side of the building. Hiccup remembers to prop the window open with what looks like an old book and they’re climbing the icy stairs.

It takes ten minutes to slog through the snow across the roof and Astrid trips twice on air conditioning units she doesn’t see under the four feet of snow, but the expanded metal of the opposite fire escape is surprisingly clear and Hiccup leads the way to Mr. Johan’s kitchen window. It’s unlocked, they can see the lock flicked to the happy, you’re-going-to-make-it-Astrid position, but when Hiccup wraps his gloved fingers around the lip and pulls, it doesn’t move, iced into place. 

A gust of wind slaps Astrid straight in the bladder and she crosses her legs like a second grader, bouncing back and forth between the balls of her feet and wincing. She’s thinking about shitting off of the fire escape like a giant pigeon. That would be a new low, at the bottom of her lowest low. It shocks her how much she doesn’t want that, how much she doesn’t want to sink deeper into pathetic. 

“We have to go back!” Hiccup shouts over the wind, crossing his arms and shivering. 

He’s cold and she’s doing this for him too. It’s selfish and selfless and she keeps telling herself that as she bends to pick up one of Mr. Johan’s empty windowsill pots and holds it like a baseball, wrenching her arm back. 

“There is no going back!”

She throws it through the window with a tinkling shatter of glass across the tile floor inside and jumps through the hole, landing in a crouch and wondering if this is what James Bond feels like all the time. 

“What the hell?” Hiccup lands after her, pushing snow goggles off of his face and sending a snowball from his hair to splat on the floor. “Why the hell would you do that? I’m going to have to pay for that!”

“It was an emergency!”

“Yeah?” He looks towards the hallway and runs, a little hitch in his gait that she’d attribute to cold if she didn’t know better. “So is this!” 

“You little shit!” 

He beats her to the bathroom, shutting and locking the door behind him. She pounds on the door and hears a delighted moan and something that sounds more like the sink than pee. 

“Oh, I had to pee so bad, this is amazing.” 

“When you get out here I’m going to…to…” she can’t think of anything through the urge to go that’s starting to be truly, actually painful. 

“Articulate Astrid,” he opens the door, poking her in the shoulder as he pushes past her. “That’s your new name.” 

“That’s your new name,” she grumbles, locking herself in the bathroom. 

Breaking the window was worth it. 

00000

When she gets done she washes her hands for an extra moment to avoid the surely awkward situation outside. She broke a window. She broke and entered. She’s still snowed in with a one-night stand. She’s made a mess out of her life in ways she didn’t even think were possible. She was supposed to be at rock bottom but apparently she brought a shovel along. 

Hiccup is surprisingly, awkwardly quiet, taping a double layer of trash bags over the gaping hole in the window and sweeping up the broken glass. Astrid sits at a chair at the kitchen table, crossing her arms and trying not to look at him. 

She’s never been great with silence. It used to drive Eret crazy, the chatter. If she didn’t have music she’d be humming to herself, if no one was talking she’d be tapping her heel. Sound helps her think, gives her something to push back against on her quest to focus.

“Just so you know,” she blurts, chewing on her pinky nail, “I’m giving you the silent treatment too. It’s mutual.” 

He’s silent. He’s better at this than her. She wants to punch him. 

“Consider yourself silently treated.” 

The walk across the hallway and back to Hiccup’s apartment is silent, stilted, and she considers going downstairs and kicking at the door again, because maybe this much angst could will the snow to budge. Maybe it’d go easy on her. Maybe she’s been punished enough. 

Hiccup snagged Mr. Johan’s plunger and carries it to his bathroom, leaving it on the still wet floor as he takes off his layers and shakes the snow out of his hair like a wet dog. Astrid follows suit, hanging the snowsuit on a hanger and tucking it in the closet with what looks like a few more of Hiccup’s grandmother’s coats. 

It does seem strange that he has so many. He’s a twenty something engineer, why would he be holding on to a half dozen old lady coats? Honestly, they don’t look like old lady coats at all, with their modern cuts and colors.

“Aha!” A shout from the bathroom disrupts her train of thought, “here’s the culprit of the clog.” 

“Shit!” She stumbles after him, jumping and reaching for the wadded up magazine page in his hand. He holds it out of her reach, yellow rubber gloves looking matronly and out of place against the thin, lanky muscles of his forearms. 

“That’s disgusting, Astrid. This has been in the toilet.” 

“Give it to me.” 

“What is it anyway?” He turns his back to her and starts unfolding the soggy paper even as she reaches around him, thumping on his stomach and trying to get it away from him. “A magazine page—If you had such an issue with the reading material, you could have just told me—”

“Stop, this isn’t funny—”

“What does this say?” He hums, “’the second type of girl you meet online is damaged and trying to prove she isn’t, to patch the cracks in her heart with the spackle of our generation: gratuitous hookups’.”

“Are you happy now?” She smacks his shoulder with the back of her hand, eyes stinging, throat tight. It feels like a secret, because it was, until now. He was the one person she knew who didn’t pity her, didn’t see her as Eret’s sad leftovers. 

Now that’s over. She misses it, misses him, the simple, bantering, miserable existence that they had in this apartment. It was like a little microcosm where she wasn’t a failure. In fact, she was a wildly successful hookup expert thwarted by the weather. 

“Astrid—”

She walks back to the living room and flops face down on the couch, pulling a pillow over her head and trying not to scream. He sits down next to her, on the floor, drumming his fingers on his knee like he’s reminding her that he’s there. Listening. Waiting. Being the most annoying person she’s ever met. 

The silence is crippling. It’s so quiet that Astrid almost misses the sound of the overflowing toilet, like a metropolitan babbling brook. White noise from a time with way more dysentery. 

She presses her face harder into Hiccup’s couch, trying to remember the last time she felt this embarrassed. Embarrassment really isn’t her thing, but apparently this is her limit. She thinks of Hiccup’s face when he saw the mysterious toilet clogging magazine page, the way his brows knit together, the flickering realization in his expression. 

God, she’s a fucking idiot.

He’s sitting on the floor next to her, and there’s like, this aura of heat surrounding his head by her hip, and she can almost feel his thoughts whirring in his head, almost imagine what assholish thing he’s going to say next. He holds all the cards and she bet against him. She deserves the impending hammer of pure sarcasm, but she’s also dreading it. She wonders if this is what it’s like to be on her bad side. 

“Astrid—”

“Don’t.” She sighs into the pillow, “I’m still preparing myself for your mocking.” 

“I’m not going to mock you.” His voice is uncharacteristically soft, and she peeks out from her pillow through a lock of tangled hair. He’s not looking at her and she cautiously rolls onto her side, pushing her hair out of her face. 

“I find that hard to believe.” 

“It’s just a stupid magazine article, there’s no truth to it.” He shrugs, and him placating her is worse than him being mean. It looks funny on him, like a chameleon in a top hat.

“That’s the thing though, it was right, not about—not about all of it, but that’s exactly what I thought I was doing. ‘Oh, get on a dating site, hook up, then you won’t feel like utter shit’.” 

“Sorry it was such a disappointment.” He’s too quiet and she sits up, leaning forward to look at his face. 

He’s frowning, staring at his hands, which are white knuckled and twined together. He’s tapping his foot—his prosthetic—against the floor, a dull thumping of his shoe on the rug reverberating through the room.

“What gave you that idea?”

“I heard you. On the phone earlier,” he shrugs, “what was it again? Something like, ‘I didn’t think I’d end a mediocre shag by being trapped with the asshole for two days’.”

Astrid flushes, “Oh, that? That was just—that was just me being a bitch. I was taking out the shitty situation on everyone, I didn’t mean it.” She hates how inauthentic she sounds, hates the way her voice trembles in that last syllable. Hates the way he digs his teeth into his bottom lip at her words, bites until it’s pale. 

“You know, Astrid, I find that women actually tend to be more honest when they’re angry.” 

She sighs, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. 

“Look, it’s not anything that you did or anything, it’s just…the way people fit together sometimes.” 

“So it was shit.” 

“That’s not what I’m saying,” she knits her hands together on her lap. “It’s just…some people don’t click, and it was a first time and it was awkward and—”

“Did you even get off? Or was that banshee-esque screaming just…just faking it.” 

“I did not scream.” 

“That’s not answering my question.” 

She sighs, “you’re a really good kisser, ok? You’ve got that down and—and it’s not that it was bad or anything, and I was all keyed up and nervous and sort of drunk-ish and—” It’s like years and years of adolescent frustration peaks all at once and she growls under her breath, thinking of high school fumbling in the backseat of Eret’s car and wondering why everything wasn’t magic like everyone always said it would be. “Guys have it so easy, you know? It’s literally just friction, that’s all, but for girls? It’s all—there are a lot of intangibles at play. It’s—it’s not as easy as you think. It takes coordination and I—sometimes it just doesn’t pan out.” 

“It has never not panned out for me before.” He sounds smug and it lights a little candle of something other than embarrassment in her chest. 

“So what? An ex? Exes, you made them all come every single time?” 

“Yeah, I’m not as much of a dick as you think, Astrid.” 

“Oh, and did they normally finish before or after you?” 

“We’d usually…” his face falls and he gestures something with his hands, “we’d usually finish simultaneously.” 

“Right.” She quirks an eyebrow. “It’s stupid. I know it’s stupid.” 

“Then why would you fake it?” 

“I don’t know!” She snaps, sliding from the couch to sit on the floor next to him, their hips pressed together. “I don’t know, and I know it doesn’t help anybody. It sure doesn’t help me, and it doesn’t help the guy learn but…but in my experience, guys are just too sensitive to talk about this stuff. They get all huffy if you do it too soon and if you wait, all of a sudden it’s awkward to bring up because they wonder why you didn’t do it earlier.” 

“So you just lie.” 

“Well,” she snorts, because this is going to sound idiotic, but if it’ll make Hiccup smirk that asshole smirk instead of staring at his hands with that pathetic little frown, it’s perversely worth it. “The only thing I’ve found is to subversively train the guy with different levels of moans without him realizing it.” 

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” he laughs, a low, rumbling laugh under his breath. “What? Do you pat their heads and call them ‘good boy’?”

“Only if they’re into that.”

The silence that follows is almost companionable, and she thinks about changing the topic, about suggesting they play monopoly to keep the fight going, but she’s not fast enough and he ruins it before she can stop him. 

“We should talk about this.”

“What?” 

“We should talk about sex.”

“Um, I was actually thinking about going back to that whole thing where we pretended we never had sex. That was fun.” 

“No,” he springs to his feet, stumbling slightly over his prosthetic and pacing the room with an energetic flail of hands. She slides back onto the couch and crosses her arms, because at least this will probably be funny, even if it’s mortifying. “Think about the situation we have here. Like, we’re two people who’ve had sex, but once this storm lets up, we’re never going to see each other again. You’re gone—”

“Like Mexico gone.” 

“Exactly! So since we’re never going to see each other again, and we’re stuck here anyway and we already got high and built a pillow fort, so—”

“So we should talk about the sex we’ve been pretending didn’t happen?” 

“No. Well yes,” he turns to her, and she can see him making a pitch for some invention his job is never going to let him build. “We critique each other’s umm…techniques to make each other better lovers for the next person.” 

Astrid blinks, like she’s going to wake up in her own bed and this whole ridiculous nightmare will have just…never happened at all. Hiccup is obviously a figment of her imagination, forcing her to relive all of her middle school nightmares, in which she would have had to tell that guy at that party that during spin the bottle he made her feel like she was making out with a lizard trying to give her a tongue bath. 

“What do you think?” He asks, and he looks nervous again, that awful, uncomfortable, reserved expression that looks so deeply wrong on his face. 

“You cannot pull off the word lovers.” 

“Of course I can.” He crosses his arms, unflinching. 

“And men cannot take criticism about this stuff! This will be a disaster, you’ll get all pissy, and then we’ll just be two pissy people trapped in a tiny apartment—”

“I will not get pissy. I won’t. I promise.” 

“You can’t handle it.” She shakes her head, trying to make her tone gentle, because she’s really saving him the pain. There are some things you just don’t fling at people.

“I’ll handle it as well as you will.” 

“What?”

“Oh, did you think this was just a one-way thing?” He looks smug again, “because I have critiques for you too.” 

That gets her. That stokes some long dead competitive fire in her chest and she feels her cheeks heat up. 

“You think you have tips for me? You have advice for me?” 

“Tip number one, arrogance is not attractive,” he numbers on his finger, “ok, on you? Maybe it’s like one percent attractive, but that’s just because you’re special and I’m weird. But in general? That whole arrogance thing isn’t going to work for you.” 

“Fine, get your rush from insulting me, just prepare yourself for an onslaught.” 

“Astrid,” he puts his hand on his chest, taken aback, “this is in the spirit of constructive criticism. I’m not insulting you, I’m helping you learn.” 

“I’ll let the next guy know that all my aptitude is due to you. Do you want me to reference your teachings on a slutty business card?” 

“No, I’d like to remain a mystery, like Hitch. By referral business only.” 

“Get on with it,” she rolls her eyes, sitting cross-legged on the couch, elbows on her knees. “Do your worst.” 

“Hmmm,” he rubs his hands together, pacing in front of her, turning to look at her occasionally like some small detail of her appearance is going to remind him of her most reprehensible sexual infraction. “What could you improve upon? Hmmm…the lights off thing!” He turns towards her, “what is that where girls have to turn the lights off?” 

“Really? That’s the advice? Guys like to have sex with the lights on?” She scoffs, a small weight lifting off of her chest. Until he said that, there was this little fear nestled in her chest that she might have actually been awful in bed. 

That she might have been so awful in bed that Eret cheated on her and then didn’t want to come back to miserable, repetitive sex that he hated. 

But if all Hiccup has to say is ‘leave the lights on’ she can’t be that bad. “I think that’s in the first sentence of literally every sex advice column in every magazine ever. Not exactly news to me.” 

“I’m just saying, we—I mean you’re a young, good-looking person. You should take advantage of that while you have it. Leave the lights on.” 

“Moving on,” she rolls her eyes. 

“Ok, you did this thing, where we made out for a minute then you stood up and sort of turned most of the way around and got all undressed all at once.” He shakes his head, “it made me feel like the unfortunate male nurse that had to give you a physical or something.” 

“I think this is your problem. I’ve literally never had any complaints about how rapidly I undress. I would think that most guys would like naked me.” 

“No, no, don’t get me wrong, naked you is awesome to look at,” a smarmy smirk that makes her whole face warm even as she wants to slug him, “and to touch, but I’m just saying, you could make the undressing a little more of a…component to the whole experience.”

“You make me sound like a roller coaster, do you want me to do a loop-de-loop and go backwards at the end of the ride?” 

“That’s hot.” 

She glares at him. 

“It wouldn’t even be that hard, you could just do a little…you know,” he twirls his hips in a circle, miming taking a bra off. “Maybe flick that towards the bed, bend over, turn around, panties off…maybe flick it with your foot, catch it…then I don’t care but…It’s a suggestion that would be very appealing if you took it under advisement.” 

“I don’t think I’ve got the picture, you should put on some heels and show me the whole routine.” 

“Advice Number Four: you were doing this thing…” He pauses, his cheeks coloring slightly, like he’s a normal guy and not some weirdo entirely comfortable with mocking her sexual abilities. “When we were, you know,” he mimes thrusting, “you were helping yourself.” His middle two fingers stretched out, he twitches his wrist in a small circle and the awkwardness of the situation threatens to consume her entirely. “And to be honest, it kind of felt like I was being benched or something. Like junior high gym all over again and I got picked last for the team—”

“Are you done?” 

“I don’t think we’re ever done with the emotional wounds junior high leaves behind.” 

“I meant with your little critique? Is it my turn yet?”

“That doesn’t sound particularly constructive, but yes, I’m finished.” 

“You might want to sit down for this,” she gestures to the couch as she stands, stretching her arms over her head and rolling her neck. “Hmmm, how could you improve your performance….let me think…”

“You are enjoying this far too much, it’s almost like you’re wounded—”

“You waited for me to undress you, which is honestly a little weird, because I’m not actually your mother tucking you into bed,” she starts pacing back and forth to avoid looking at him, because this is weird and it feels mean like her jokes so rarely do. “You don’t have to wait for me, I sure hope you know how to take off your own belt.” 

“Since last year, actually. I’m a quick learner.” 

“Once, during foreplay, I was sort of close to coming, and I think I sort of hinted at it, do you remember what I said?” 

“You said ‘I’m close to coming’.”

“And when I said that, you changed up what you were doing, can you tell me what exactly your thinking process there was?” 

“I thought I was going like a…finishing flourish, like a mortal combat,” he flicks his wrist, his always moving fingers twitching again in that way that makes her cringe and feel far too warm all at once, “finish her sort of move. Really drive it home.” 

“That’s wrong and it doesn’t work, and if a girl tells you she’s close, keep doing exactly what you’re doing.” She’s looking at him now, and it makes the back of her neck prickle, like her uncle is actually ashamed of her right now. And embarrassed for her. And God, maybe the snow would be better than this, but he challenged her and now she can’t back down. “You made it to third and you really can bring it home so just…” she mimes swinging a bat and starts pacing again. 

“Duly noted.” 

He’s a better student than her. She hates him. 

“Ok, whoever started that thing where guys are supposed to spell the alphabet with their tongue deserves a braille alphabet stamped into their ass.” 

“What’s wrong with the alphabet trick?” 

“It’s not a trick, it makes me feel like I’m a code breaker in some really perverse war and I’m supposed to turn Navajo tongue motions into a key—”

“And that’s not something you’re into?” 

“And then you went way too fast, like…like you were drilling me for oil? Like my entire body was shaking and not in a good way. Slow down, I can’t feel anything when you’re doing that.” 

He’s nodding thoughtfully, and it’s encouraging, like he might actually print her advisement skills on a recommendation somewhere, “is that all?”

“Nope, another thing!” She’s going now and she can’t stop and she flops down on the couch next to him, crossing her legs. “When a girl is helping herself, it’s a good fucking thing. You only have two hands and you’re doing that whole ‘hold yourself up and thrust’ thing. Embrace the team work, we aren’t competing on some awesome erotic Japanese game show, we’re having sex, it’s a joint effort, not a fucking competition.” 

He snorts.

“Is that funny?” 

“You said fucking competition, as in we’re competing at fucking, and that’s ironic because you were just saying we weren’t competing—”

“Did you listen to a word of that or were you just picking on my semantics the entire time.” 

“No, I listened,” he nods, biting his lip again, looking up at her through his eyelashes. “And there’s not…there’s not anything else you want to mention? Anything having to do with my leg or…”

“What about your leg?”

“The whole fact that’s partially gone?” He winces at the words like they’re physically painful, “I’m just saying—I mean, it’s not a politically correct thing to ask, but I don’t think you’ve worried about being politically correct a day in your life, but—anyway, did…would I have been better in bed if I had the leg, or did me lacking a leg make me suck or—”

“I didn’t notice,” she cuts him off, the pain in his expression getting to her again. It’s like brain freeze, what at first sip is so sweet suddenly turning biting and painful. “Honestly, it confused the shit out of me this morning when you were holding this fake leg like a bat and the burglar alarm was going off. I didn’t think twice about it.” 

He’s too quiet, staring at her like he doesn’t believe her, and the word vomit pushes past the last veil of her conscience. 

“I mean, you probably wouldn’t have any luck with like, foot fetishists but that’s not my personal thing, so…” 

He snorts and shakes his head, his hips quirking into a gentler smile than she’s seen, one she finds herself liking, even through layers of embarrassment and awkwardness and the extreme, never abetting urge to run.

“That’s so offensive, it’s literally the most comforting thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” 

“Glad I could help,” she pops her lips, turning towards the TV and flicking it on with the remote on the coffee table. The weatherman is yelling over the storm, snow matted against his chest and side with the force of the wind, a drift forming halfway up his waist. 

‘The storm continues to pile up, I don’t think we’ll be seeing a break for a few hours at least. South Table is right behind me but you can’t even see it! This is the storm of the decade, if not the century…’

“What do you want to bet that meteorologist is fully erect right now?” She asks just to break the silence and is taken aback when Hiccup laughs, an honest, full throated, appealing laugh. 

She turns to face him, her face anything but passive and he shrugs, putting on that practiced smirk once again. 

“It was funny.” 

“Is it cool if I take a shower?” 

“As long as you don’t try and wash a magazine down the drain.” 

She glares at him. 

“Yeah, no, go ahead. The towels are…on the floor. I guess.” 

“Thanks,” she stands up too quickly, wiping her palms on her jeans and walking towards the bathroom.


	5. Chapter 5

Astrid stares at the mess in the bathroom for a moment, the door clicking shut behind her echoing in the damp space. She nudges a soaking towel into the corner by the tub and wrinkles her nose at the way it sogs her sock. 

The stolen plunger is still in the middle of the room and she picks it up with hesitant fingertips and sets it by the thankfully functioning toilet. 

It’s a testament to how far their conversation just devolved that she can’t even focus on the fact that she just dealt mass property damage in the pursuit of breaking, entering, and using a stranger’s toilet. 

She bends down to pull her damp sock off and catches her reflection in the mirror over the sink. 

Hiccup is gross. Of course. All guys would want nothing more than a striptease, that’s obvious, he didn’t need to tell her that. In fact, he just said a bunch of really obvious things and acted like it was brand new information. He forgot to remind her that it’s snowing though, so he left a base uncovered. 

Base. Like a baseball sex metaphor type base. 

Maybe there’s a reason aside from lack of birth control and women’s rights that people used to have a dozen kids to work the farm. How much is there really to do when you’re locked in with someone for a long time? And like Hiccup said, they already got high and made a pillow fort. 

And critiqued each other sexual performance because apparently, they couldn’t even go twenty-four hours ignoring the fact that they did, in fact, have sex with each other. 

She teeters, because she’s been standing here on one leg like an urban dwelling flamingo native to dysentery creek, halfway through taking her sock off, and when she catches her reflection again, she hates that she thinks Hiccup might have a point. It’s not really an attractive pose—not that she has to be sexy at all times, that’s stupid, and part of the women’s rights issue that means she will not be having twelve kids to work any farm—but it still makes her pause. 

She shuffles over to the sink, drumming her fingertips on the edge of the porcelain and staring at her reflection like it knows something she doesn’t. Are you there mirror-Astrid? It’s me, Astrid, you’re currently in the bathroom mirror of the guy I attempted to have a one-night stand with but then I got snowed in and it’s a whole thing, laws have been broken, I critiqued his sex-technique, mirror-wisdom would be appreciated. 

Mirror-Astrid would shrug, if she weren’t dependent on real world motion to bend light, and the twinkle in her eye says something like ‘well, it would look hotter if you unbuttoned that oversized flannel more slowly while maintaining eye contact.’

Mirror-Astrid is the slut. Maybe she’s been the slut this whole time. 

Maybe she has a point. 

She bites her lip, reaching for the top button of her shirt and popping it open slowly, cocking her hip to one side. 

And again, they’ve already gotten high and made a pillow fort and broke and entered and committed plunger-themed larceny. What else is there to do, really? She was right this morning, she cannot un-sex him, but having sex with him twice, well…they’ve already done it once. 

And it’s cold outside, if the furnace goes out they might have to generate body heat. 

They should practice, maybe. 

Ok, if the furnace were going to go out, it probably would have happened already, but it’s a secondary argument. If she needs it. He is a guy, and he didn’t have any problem getting interested in having sex with her last night. 

She fusses with her hair, pressing her bangs down against her forehead and then shoving them to the side when they don’t stay down. It’s fine, her hair doesn’t matter, this is not a seduction, it’s a scientific endeavor. 

That’s it. It’s an experiment. 

“Hey Hiccup,” she walks normally into the living room. Or she tries to walk normally. Usually, when she walks normally, she’s not thinking about walking normally, but nothing is usual about this situation so she’s doing her best. 

“What did you do to my shower?” He asks without looking up from his laptop and she perches on the back of the couch above his shoulder, trying and failing to soften her glare, even though she wants something from him. 

“Nothing.” She sighs, “I was thinking.” 

“That’s always dangerous.” 

“You know what? Never mind, it’s stupid.” She stands back up, glad that his personality just saved her from sounding stupid, for once. 

“No, sorry,” he closes his laptop and looks up at her upside down, head on the back of the couch, hair flopping away from eyes that look greener considering what she’s about to say, “stupid’s my favorite. What’s up?” 

“I was just thinking,” she pauses, waiting for him to interrupt again, but sadly, he appears to have learned his lesson, at least momentarily, “so the hypothesis of our conversation is that a frank conversation with a mutual interest towards self-improvement would make us better lovers.” 

“Oh, so you can pull it off?” 

“Yes.” She crosses her arms and leans on the couch again, “or no, it’s—I don’t think anyone can really pull it off, it’s kind of an awful word, but—”

“Are you back for more?” He raises an eyebrow, and the expression is an understanding of an inside joke, like all their jokes aren’t inside jokes, considering the weather. 

He doesn’t mean it and it makes her blush. 

“Yes.” She stares him down, direct like she was chatting with him. Asking the clear question. 

“Ok, hmm, you were largely a very adequate lover, but I’m sure there are some minutiae I could help you finesse for a future time with someone else—”

“I think we should have sex again. For science.” She tucks her hair behind her ear and feels it sticking out. But this isn’t a seduction, it’s the intro to a lab class. Today, the lesson is practical. Hands on. Real-world applicable. “Keep the lines of communication open, put some of what we just talked about into practice.” 

“I know that supposedly, all I need is friction, but I’m not sure I could take your well-intentioned critiques while trying to perform.” He rolls his eyes, not taking her seriously, and she lets her hands drift back to the buttons on her shirt, letting her eyes bore into his as she pops the next one loose. 

His eyes flick down. He licks his lips. The way he’s looking at her is almost worth how silly she feels and she makes a note in her mental, sexual lab notebook. It’s crisp and new, the blank paper feeling a little sexual under her mental pencil. It’s new too, fresh out of the package. 

0.05mm lead. Fine tip. A precision instrument. 

Ok, too far. Too far. But there’s something sexual about new paper and she’s just leaning into it right now. 

“I’m just saying, before we trot out our miracle cure for sexual incompatibility, we should probably do some clinical trials. It’s only responsible.” She’s never seduced anyone before, especially not a one-night stand she ordered on the internet on the eve of a once in a century blizzard, but it feels good to speak medically again, even if it’s not a good metaphor. 

Clinical trials take months. Years. 

“I mean, we haven’t even nailed down stock options yet.” He’s nervous, and it’s infuriatingly obvious in his big green eyes, and it’s also infuriating, because he’s supposed to be a cocky dick that she literally ordered on the internet. 

“A dry run can’t hurt anything, it’s just compiling more data,” she pops another button open and he bites his lip, setting his laptop aside. 

“Well, not a dry run. Hopefully.” He smirks, half-honest, and she doesn’t want to know that he puts a smiley face on his oatmeal or that he’s worried about what she thinks of his leg, but she does, and she’s trying to make the best of it. 

“In a normal sexual situation, there should be some lead up, but considering everything, it’s ok for you to just kiss me.” Her stomach twists at the creak in the floorboards when he stands up slowly, faking confidence behind the cracks she’s ignoring, because they make him an outlier she shouldn’t consider sampling. 

And he’s silent. Bigger without words jostling his shoulders as his hand finds her waist, fingers bunching in her oversized shirt. And he looks at her, gaze a steady confirmation before he kisses her, knee nudging between hers as he guides her backwards. 

“That’s good,” she pulls back enough to nod and he grins, too real again. “The knee thing.” 

“Yeah?” He follows as she takes a couple more steps back towards the bedroom, “I thought it was suggestive—”

“Please don’t explain every move to me.” She kisses him, hands fisting in his collar. 

“They’re very nuanced though, I want to make sure you understand.” His hand slides under her shirt, too warm against the small of her back. And his knee nudges between her legs again and she trips on the edge of the rug, stumbling back into the doorframe. “Shit, are you ok?” 

“I’m fine,” she rolls her shoulder. Shake it off, Hofferson. “Walking backwards while kissing is fine in movies, not so great in real life.” 

“Noted.” He follows her into the bedroom, where unfortunately the bed is unmade. 

“Remember when I wanted to see your apartment?” She asks, half-expecting to need to explain, because nothing outside of the last day feels real, especially with the buzzing under her skin when she thinks about what’s about to happen. 

“I had to put all my Bundy fan-club awards down the garbage disposal, of course I remember.” He jokes, his voice deeper, breathing husky on the shell of her ear, and she shivers. “I’m devastated.” 

“Well, a girl likes a clean place. Makes you feel taken care of, I guess.” She grabs the clean fitted sheet from the basket in the corner and starts putting it on the mattress. “Also, women want to have sex with functional adults, a made bed is an easy first step.” 

“That hasn’t been my experience.” He laughs and she rolls her eyes, tugging the sheet tight and tossing him the next layer. 

“You’ve had a different demographic thus far.” 

“No, I mean making a bed is like wrestling an eight-foot long, six-foot wide rectangular bear,” he throws the duvet over the flat sheet as she shoves the second pillow into its case, “might need a nap to rebuild strength and energy before the sex.” 

“Lay down then,” she shoves his shoulder a little too hard, refusing to feel guilty when he falls back on the bed, propping himself on his elbows. 

“Lights are on,” she refuses to let her voice shake, tilting her chin at the bulb above the bed as she pops open the next button of her shirt. He watches, eyes flicking between her face and chest as another button comes undone. 

“You’re a quick study,” he pulls his shirt over his head and tosses it on the floor before going for his belt. 

“You too,” she compliments, unbuttoning her pants and pushing them down with an unnecessary sway in her hips, trying not to smile when he licks his lips, pupils wide. 

She faces away from him, shrugging the shirt slowly off her shoulders, letting it fall against her heels. She unhooks her bra and bends forward, letting it fall off of her arms as she tugs her underwear down, bending at the waist and trying not to feel stupid or cold or slow as she steps out of them. 

She looks over her shoulder at him, standing up at that glacial pace and turning to face him like an iceberg drifting past Greenland. 

He’s breathing hard, skinny chest heaving above the boxer briefs that are thankfully the only thing he’s still wearing. His leg is on the floor and she’s not sure whether she’s supposed to look or not, so she keeps her focus on his face. 

“Is that…” she cocks her hip, then regrets it, unsure where to put her hands. It’s cold. He’s staring. She wants to turn the lights off or to make a joke or to get under a blanket because it’s actually cold in here. He should keep his place warmer, probably, and she should tell him, but she just got naked the slowest she ever has and she needs his opinion on it, because nothing makes sense. “Is that more what you thinking of?” 

“Yeah,” he nods, too fast, and she almost tells him off for being cute when they’re trying to be scientific, “that was—yeah. Good. You really took my point and um…yeah.” 

“Honestly I just…moved slower—”

“Men are so stupid,” he sits up, waving his arms at her in something halfway summoning, “come here. Now. Please. That’s not an order, I just—you, wow—”

“So, lights on, strip slowly is a real thing?” She half jokes on her way to the bed, trying to frame how his eyes feel on her skin in terms of scientific understanding. The mutual pursuit of knowledge. Earnest commitment to research. 

“Men are dumb.” He catches her waist with a long, warm arm and pulls her down into the bed, hovering over her as his lips latch onto her pulse-point, callused hand sweeping across her ribs. 

“Apparently.” She moans when his thumb glances across her nipple and he leans up slightly to look at her face. “What?” 

“Trying to discern real from faking it,” he teases, self-conscious, and her stomach twists at the still hand on her side that she so badly wants to be moving. 

“It’s going to be easier to get me off if you’re trying to,” she nods at him, “instead of reacting to imagined criticism.” 

“Oof,” he winces, scooting his hips away from her an inch, “that’s—while true, that’s also generally applicable to my failures as a person, which isn’t sexy to think about—”

“You’re not into being accidently insulted by people who just stripped for you?” She jokes, reaching up instinctually to rub the back of his neck, his shoulders. His ass, surprisingly taut under his boxers. And the lights are on and goosebumps prickle up her stomach. 

“Accidentally?” He’s a little too soft, a little too meek, and she tugs him back down to her by his hair. 

“Yes.” She kisses him, and she was honest earlier. He’s a good kisser, just how he’d be a good conversationalist if it weren’t being forced upon her as the only option. It’s give and take, it’s soft lips and the hard edge of teeth. It’s determination behind the acquiescence in his moan as his hand finds her breast and squeezes. “That’s good.” 

“Yeah?” He kisses down her neck, taking his time like he hadn’t the night before, his fingers curling around her waist and pulling her against him, his thigh between hers. She hooks her leg around his hip and he groans into her neck, “that’s—”

“Not good?” She starts to move her leg but he catches her thigh above her knee, pressing it closer to his side. 

“Very good.” He kisses her collarbone, her nipple, breathing hard against her sternum. “It’s like you want me closer,” he shudders when she drags her fingernails up his back, “good move. All good moves.” 

“You too, this is good.” She reaches between them, fumbling under the waistband of his boxer briefs, “I don’t mind the stubble.” She groans when he drags his chin against her neck, kissing under her jaw. She grabs his length and he stiffens, forehead on her collarbone as his expected groan comes out as a whine. “What?” 

“You’re very direct,” he catches her wrist with a firmness that makes her core twitch. “It’s—I like it, don’t get me wrong here, I’m a stupid, friction-obsessed man and that feels—you’re naked—and you—”

“It’s distracting,” she lets go, pulling her hand out of his boxers and letting it rest on her lower stomach, flirting with the juncture between her legs. 

“Yes,” he kisses her, “and that’s not a bad thing, I’m just trying to focus.” 

“On?” She flirts. She doesn’t have to, but she does. And he presses his leg against her core and his breath is hot against her neck and maybe talking is what sex has needed this entire time. 

Talking and a quick-witted tongue on her chest, and long, callused fingers dipping between her legs. Soft, auburn hair tickling her neck as she arches under the contact. 

“Don’t…don’t say anything about a dry run right now, I…will kill you.” She grips his shoulders, heel dragging down his short calf and back onto the bed as he almost gets it right, the sizzling contact just off epicenter. 

“Wouldn’t make sense, anyway.” He kisses her neck, her cheek, his smirk like a brand against her skin as he swipes just past where he should. 

“Just—up, ok? And to the right?” She doesn’t want to sound irritated, but it’s irritating to have things feel so good and almost great. He adjusts, over-adjusts really, and she reaches down to grab his hand and direct him, her fingers over his. “There, it’s just—like…”

“This?” He mimics her motion and she squints her eyes shut, her knees clenching on his hips as she nods. “Am I—I mean is this getting you to…where you need?” He’s awkward, and earnest, and arousal flares in her chest like an errant spark. 

“I mean it takes a minute.” She gets out, wrapping her arms around his neck and burying her face in his shoulder. He smells like breaking and entering and a stupid high day in a pillow fort and she tries to focus on his fingers and how they’re trying to build style into the method she prescribed him. 

They aren’t marching, they’re dancing, adding his own flair to steps she’d thought were set in stone. 

And the lights are on, and he’s watching her like a gauge. Like something independent, instead of as a reflection of himself. And he kisses her lips and her cheek and a finger dips into her, long and agile but impatient too. 

“Can I, I mean, I was under the impression that you were going to be critiquing—unless—”

“No critiques necessary,” she eeks out, biting her lip and pressing back against his touch. She feels spectated, but knowing why helps. He wants to see her. He wants to study her falling apart, like it’s a phenomenon, and the thought makes her toes curl as his pupils widen and he kisses her neck, her chest, looking up for her reaction between. 

He slows down. 

“Don’t go easy on me, it’s obviously not working—”

“It just takes a bit,” she snaps, grabbing his wrist and pressing his hand closer, “it’s slower, it takes a minute, it was…you were on the right track.” 

“How long is the track?” He kisses her jaw and her neck, his hips nudging against hers. He groans when she wraps her leg back around his hips and she feels her own chest, letting the feeling bloom in her stomach. 

“As long as it is.” She tries to be grumpy. It half works. He twitches when she grabs his length again, his groan shuddering against her neck as his hand falters. 

Two long fingers dip inside of her then and she gasps, grabbing his upper arm. 

“Is that—”

“Don’t stop.” She tries not to squirm, tries not to mess up the angle he has, what feels like the whole length of his fingers stroking against what she has to believe is her G-spot, more obvious than it ever has been, like banter is foreplay. Like his very presence is foreplay. Like this was inevitable. Like he is inevitable. “You found…”

He rubs it. 

She regrets ever arguing with an engineer, double entendre implied. 

“Is that?” 

“Don’t stop,” she clenches his arm, probably too tight, but there’s no time to think about that because he’s kissing her, stubble and lip and tongue and hand doing that again and again and again. 

“Might have to, if you keep that grip.” He kisses her cheek and she arches into it, because his hand is unraveling her like she’s grandma’s first sweater attempt and he’s warm and earnest. 

She reaches down to touch herself and he gasps like it’s been ripped out of him. She bites her lip, leaning into the warmth, which yanks the cord to get his hand moving again, and then it’s here and they’re kissing and she feels her throat going hoarse before she knows he’s kissing her. And he doesn’t stop kissing, or petting, or holding. 

And this is the worst idea she’s ever had. 

“You didn’t want me to explain my moves,” he kisses her cheek. Her ear. His other hand cradles her neck so sweetly, tilting it as he kisses and where was this last night. Where was this when she needed him. 

“Explain them.” She’d say he was wrong if she needs to. She’d say anything. His fingers are thrusting and she’s rubbing and she can’t breathe and every time she bucks up, his hips press back down against hers like a promise. 

“Well, I’m um…” He pauses. She kisses his chin because it’s what she can reach. His rhythm falters and she bites her lip. “Well, I uh…think I found your G-spot.” 

She nods. 

He gets so red that she could light a fire on his face and she digs her heel into the back of his thigh. 

“Is that a yes?” 

She nods. She hits his shoulder with her free hand, doubling down as he strokes. 

“We are communicating,” he kisses her, “I need a yes—”

“Yes,” she yelps, “more. Yes. Don’t stop. Asshole.” She squeaks out, and he’s kissing her. Everywhere. And his hand in her is moving, his thumb joining hers on her clit and when she opens her eyes, there’s something in his gaze. 

He’s committed. He’s tuned in. 

“You’ve told me, emphatically I might add,” he presses her clit for a second, suddenly at home in the mastery he’d only hoped for a second ago, “to not tell you about my moves.”

“You had moves you didn’t tell me about?” She struggles to sound indignant when he’s touching her like this. When he’s devoted like this. When he’s redeeming himself, sure with this kind of frantic, earnest energy. 

It hits all at once. 

She clings to his shoulders, crying out a bit too loud, glad for the empty apartment as his fingers stroke deep. And human. And he’s close and real and she’s trying not to remember that this is nothing, a fling, a one-night stand, an addendum to a one-time thing.

And he’s hard. And that was great. And she wants him. 

She wants something. That’s easier. 

She wants parts of him. Now. 

“Was that..?” He kisses her forehead, his arms wrapping around her. 

And he holds her, that’s a point in his favor. He held her last night and he holds her again and she wants to compliment him and for once, there’s no gateway. 

“Nothing fake,” she says as a truth and a comfort and his hand finds her core again, perfectly lazy, hesitantly in something close to awe. “Condom. Now.” 

“But my redemption—”

“On track,” she rolls to the side, digging in the bedside table for the reel of condoms she found earlier. 

“But you—”

“I did,” she cups his face, pulling him close with an arm around his waist, “do you ever stop talking?” 

“Not in living memory.” He touches that spot within her again and she shivers, ankles crossed behind his back. “Can I have some room to move?” He kisses the hollow of her throat, and his voice is relieved and she reaches to stroke him with a pleasure-lazy vengeance. “Astrid, I—” 

“Hiccup,” she settles on his name, because she doesn’t know how else to communicate, even if it ends in him staring at her, through her, into her. 

“For science,” he lines himself up and she bites her lip. 

“It’s just good practice at this point.” 


	6. Chapter 6

“How was…how was that?” Hiccup asks, flopping back onto the bed with more force than his skinny shoulders should be able to produce. 

They’re a few experiments in, a couple of failed hypotheses closer to the truth. Her hands are shaking, her skin twitching when he pulls the sheet up her chest, a _fond_ gesture that she should tell him to stop. But they’re being honest, and she honestly likes it, enough that she scoots sideways to rest her head on his shoulder. 

His hand finds her hip, stroking in a lazy, exhausted way that makes her chest throb even though it’s somewhere beyond the middle of the night and there’s no way they’re doing that again. Because there’s no way they have energy to do that again. 

Maybe if he did all the work. 

“That was good,” she adjusts to get comfortable, her temple against a sweaty collarbone that doesn’t quite do the trick. He’s the close kind of bony, like he has less of a buffer, and she can see why his personality is as oversized as his hair. 

He might kiss the top of her head. She’s not sure. She should ask, in the name of honesty, but she doesn’t know how much she cares about honesty if he’ll touch her again in the morning. 

Like there’s a limit, obviously if he started spouting racist slurs or required a pledge of allegiance first, that would be a no-go, but a little hair kissing? Forgivable. 

Corny, but forgivable, given the circumstances. Given how if she thinks about it, it feels like there’s no one else on the planet. 

“I’m…” He trails off, nose in her hair. Nuzzling her hair. And Ruffnut said no one would bang her pre-shower. Ruffnut just doesn’t have a mind for the science of it all. “I’m…”

“You’re…” She half-asks, half-ignores, eyelids feeling heavy as his warm palm settles on her waist. 

“Hungry.” He laughs, stubble evident on her forehead. 

Her stomach growls. 

He laughs. He kisses her head. She should ask why he keeps doing that and also ask if there’s a pizzeria in the basement that she didn’t notice in either her haste to get up here or her haste to leave. A 24-hour pizzeria. Open during a blizzard. 

“We should go figure that out.” 

“I was thinking take out,” he laughs, voice still low, kissing her head again, and his boniness shouldn’t be so soft. This shouldn’t be so ok. “Or we can eat here.” His hand migrates down, tickling her stomach, and she twitches at the memory of the last hour even as she grabs his fingers. 

“I’m literally hungry,” she laughs, “for calories. Not jokes.” 

His stomach growls. And he earned it, and that makes her laugh, which makes him laugh, chest reverberating like it’s bigger than it is. Big hand on her waist. Lips in her hair. 

“Me too.” 

“Well, let’s go do something about it.” She sits up, taking the blanket with her, and he has the audacity to be groggy as he sits up slowly and fumbles for his leg. Before his boxers. It feels intimate. And he looks up at her through his eyelashes, adjusting his stance, everything _out._

And penises are weird. And she feels like she can’t look at anything else. Maybe it’s allowed though, for science. 

It looks hungry too. Not for calories, necessarily, but it has also driven the show for the last few hours, so maybe it’s someone else’s turn. 

“Here,” he tosses her the shirt he’d been wearing before pulling up his boxer briefs and it’s easier to pull it on than it is to emotionally fund an archaeological expedition to the site of her strip tease that wasn’t a tease. 

It was an appetizer. 

And he ate. 

And they’re still hungry. 

Because scientific endeavors don’t have any calories. 

“Food?” He looks at her like it’s really a question. Like her answer isn’t ‘forget the food and get back here because I’m cold’. 

Her stomach gurgles and he grins, holding out his hand and pointedly ignoring her eye roll. He pointedly ignores a lot of things, among them, how obvious it is that there is no food. He lets her look through every cabinet and find mustard, a pack of gum, vitamin C supplements, and a single packet of fruit snacks. 

And it’s snowing. 

And she’s wearing his shirt and nothing else and she knows what she can do with his hands and she swallows hard as she turns to face him. 

“We have to ration the fruit snacks. Who knows how long they have to last?” She tosses the packet at him. He drops it. He bends down to pick it up and his ass is right there. She wonders if she’s allowed to tell him that his ass is more distracting than his leg, but even asking that of herself ruins the game. “Also why don’t you have food?” 

“I did, until we got high.” 

“Fair.” She tucks her hair behind her ear. “Fair.” 

“Why…why don’t you just go back to bed?” His voice dips as he asks the question and she wonders how asking him to do all the work would really come across as his fingertips glance across her thigh. “I’ll be there in a minute.” 

“Are you weighing the fruit snacks?” She backs into the doorway and pauses, elbow on the doorframe, “because as the person who just got off more, I could make a concrete argument for getting the bigger half of the fruit snacks—”

“You can have the whole packet.” His lip twitches like a warning he tries to squelch and she takes it, for once, shuffling out of the room. Badly moonwalking, almost. 

His awkward is contagious. 

She has the feeling there’s a vaccine, and she should have acquired it socially at some point, but she didn’t. And she’s here. Badly moonwalking out of a kitchen over a fruit snack victory. 

Sometimes rock bottom isn’t so hard. Sometimes it’s padded with expired fruit snacks. 

“I’ll hold you to that,” she mumbles before turning and shuffling off, refusing to hold the shirt down. 

The longer she sits in it, the more comfortable Hiccup’s bed becomes. His bedroom is homey in a way hers never has been, disorganized enough to feel lived in, the blanket well-worn and soft around her waist. Her bedroom was always so clean, everything in its place, until the last few months. And even now, it’s not really comfortable, it’s more just…messy. Like she lost interest in everything before it made it back to its place. It feels like lethargy, like sleeping until three, and staring at a computer screen until her eyes burn and she’s forgotten all that she didn’t get done. 

She likes Hiccup’s room. She likes thinking about last night, about being tangled together in a web of constant communication. She flushes when she remembers that she probably shouldn’t be thinking about it, adjusting Hiccup’s shirt around her waist and curling her knees to her chest. 

Hiccup comes in a moment later, holding a suspiciously laden tray, the all too familiar smell of Kraft macaroni and cheese wafting towards her. 

“Where did you get that?” She shifts, accepting the tray as he slides back into bed next to her, quickly thumbing his prosthetic off and hiding his leg immediately in the blankets. There’s a full, expired packet of fruit snacks on her side and she wonders if feeding anybody anything has ever been sexy and if that’s enough of a concept to turn into an experiment. 

“Don’t worry about it.” 

Astrid takes one of the bowls from the tray and frowns, because where Hiccup’s skin is touching hers it’s warm, and he didn’t go outside and—

“This is your neighbors’ food, isn’t it?” 

He avoids her eyeline just enough to prove her point and she grins, “you were such an asshole about me breaking that window, and now you’re breaking into their apartment and stealing their food. Hypocrite.” 

“They will understand,” he shrugs, stirring his food and taking a bite. “I’ll tell them it was life or death, that if I didn’t feed the crazy girl I met online, she was going to go all Donner Party on my ass.” 

“I still might,” she’s suddenly too aware that it’s his shirt warm and soft on the back of her neck. “You did witness me breaking and entering, I probably shouldn’t let you live.” 

“But I fed you,” he elbows her, shifting slightly closer to her in a magnetic way she wishes she didn’t notice. “And for the record, I thought it was pretty badass when you broke that window.” 

“I agree,” she takes a bite, and Kraft has never tasted so good. The muffled moan at the taste of fake cheese is embarrassing and she clears her throat, “I’m glad you came to your senses. It _was_ badass.” 

“I have to say,” he slows down, stirring his mac and cheese and looking at her, eyes narrowed. His eyelashes are ridiculously thick, dark in the half-light of the room, and she wonders what she would have thought about him if she’s met him anywhere else, in any other way. “I really don’t get you. Like, one moment you’re unemployed, looking for a booty call online at midnight, and the next you’re just…this go-getter, take-no-shit-even-from-windows-or-laws rebel. Which is it?” 

Astrid should be angry, and some remnant of who she used to try and be stirs in her chest, offended at the idea of being a rebel. The rest of her is…well, she’s flattered he asked. That he noticed. 

“I don’t know, both?” She takes another bite, mulling it over for a while. “I was valedictorian in high school. Graduated college at the top of my class. I had not the requisite three, but six letters of recommendation ready to be sent off to medical school but…” 

The way he’s looking at her makes it hard to breathe, hard to think, hard to remember that she’s damaged goods, doomed to keep that never-healing injury close to her chest until it scabs over and becomes some knotted whorl of scar tissue. 

“I was engaged once,” she can’t look at him as she says it, and her hands suddenly look like they should be attached to someone older. Like they’re her grandmother’s knuckles. “Sounds like I’m writing a memoir. I was engaged recently, up until a few months ago.” She shrugs, “he cheated. I wanted to work it out, he didn’t. You know, typical…whatever, bullshit, but…” It’s hard to talk about in a way she can’t explain, hard to form the words on her tongue even while they’re surging through her brain. 

Harder when he looks at her, more curious than sympathetic, chin tilting to the side. 

“I thought…” She swallows, thinking about rebellion, and how maybe after months of listening to the reality of her shit situation, she needs to push back against it. “I thought that maybe getting back out there, getting back on the metaphorical, dick-shaped horse might make it sting less and maybe that’s stupid, but—”

“Did it work?” He’s too quiet to really cut her off but she was so hoping to hear him talk that she pauses when he does. 

And he has those earnest eyes. 

She shrugs, wishing she’d grabbed her own shirt while also being glad that she didn’t. His is softer. The kind of shirt a girlfriend would love to steal, and she’s never thought of being that person again. All paths forward were cul-de-sacs to be walked alone in fits of depressive pacing. 

She bites back a smile. She feels tired. A bit sore. Her stomach more than the rest of her, because it was hilarious when he tipped backwards off of the bed. She’s lost, but no more than usual, in fact she might have re-discovered the concept of North, as an idea. A theory. A constant that exists separate from whatever direction she’s facing. 

“I don’t get how someone could be there through…I mean, it used to feel like everything. Like life stopped at college graduation and everything since has been limbo, but anyway, I don’t get how someone could see what I was working towards every day for years and then suddenly, it was too much. I was too much.” 

“You?” He raises an eyebrow, leaning back against the bedframe with a snort, “never.” 

“Apparently he just couldn’t take me ‘obsessing’ anymore. That was the word.” She hasn’t told anyone this. Not her mom, not Ruffnut. She’s held it close like an infection, fearing a diagnosis that would require an emotional surgery so invasive it would be more exorcism than excision. 

“Obsessive,” he nods, “I’ve heard that one a few times too. Mostly from people who think I’m in the way or I will be soon.” 

“The thing is, I was always like that. I was the twelve-year-old with a five-year plan, I was the eighteen-year-old with a plan for my second promotion at forty, it didn’t show up out of nowhere. You think he would have told me my ‘obsessiveness’ was a deal-breaker before he bought a ring.” She sighs, “like he never did anything else he was ‘supposed’ to, why did he suddenly start? And who told him that I thought he was supposed to propose?” 

“No, I—the way I see it, people need to realize that refusing to make a decision is a kind of decision.” Hiccup’s fork clangs against his bowl as he drops it on his lap, freeing his hands up to talk, “people spend their entire lives either trying to avoid the flow or completely immersing themselves in the flow until they freak out at the lack of decision in their lives and it’s the same on both sides.” He gestures at one corner of the room, eyes bright, “you’re either thirty or forty or fifty, flitting between random part time jobs or you get a job straight out of college and then you have to get an apartment and you can’t lose the job because of the apartment, and then you have to keep houseplants alive to prove you’re an adult because the standard is impossible—”

“I don’t really know where you’re getting your standards—”

“And ‘obsessive’? As an insult, it’s—being a little obsessive is the only thing that cuts across it, so of course people hate it. Because it makes them realize that they’re either drifting down the lazy river of life, or they’re fighting the current just to brag about it. And that they’ve never actually thought about what they want, versus what they’re supposed to have by now, on some imaginary timeline.” He looks at her, cheeks red like he forgot he had an audience for his rant. “And really people are just jealous that they never thought of wanting something that hadn’t already been sold to them, so then it’s your fault for making them realize it.” 

She doesn’t think that ended up where he wanted it to. She’s not sure it ended up at all, it just spiraled higher and wilder, but she liked it. The limitless-ness of it, the fact he found the energy for it. 

“Wow.” 

“Blacked out for a second there,” he tries to put the energy away but it crackles between them, “high on my own dulcet tones.” 

“We should go like…write to our senators or something,” she laughs, punching him in his skinny arm. 

“Right,” the cynical mask doesn’t fit under his bed-head and she nudges his shoulder with hers, taking another bite of stolen mac and cheese. 

“No, you’re right, it’s…he couldn’t care about anything enough to decide on it. It’s not just me. He liked the concept but the reality of choosing what his forever looked like didn’t sit well.” 

“I feel bad for him, honestly.” He laughs and she tries to resist the cold fingers that curl in her chest as she raises a judgmental eyebrow. 

“What about this story makes him seem like the one who should be pitied?” Except she doesn’t want his pity either, but she knows she doesn’t need to tell him that from the way he smirks at her. With her. Conspiratorial, not confrontational. 

“Because he’s so stupid and he doesn’t even know it.” He finishes his food and sets the bowl aside on the bedside table next to an empty condom wrapper that didn’t make it into the trash. Because this isn’t the environment for a heart to heart and he’s not the person she should want one from, but here she is, watching the snow fall outside the window over his shoulder. “He thinks you’re just one example of some milestone girl and when he thinks he’s ready, he’ll find another one, but that’s not—you’re not. You’re—of all the girls I could have met on that dating site--” 

His face softens, and the hazy potential in his expression amplifies the energy that she doesn’t want to name. To name it is to acknowledge it, and to acknowledge it cements her place on top of the podium for ‘worst one-night-stand-haver’.

“What are those?” But she’s never been good at keeping quiet. And maybe sometimes, at the end of a long, winding losing streak, any win counts as a win. 

“What are what?” 

“Those mushy, lovey-dovey eyes you’re looking at me with right now.” She punches his arm again, lighter this time, then jokingly points her thumb over her shoulder. “Get those out of here.” 

“It’s like three in the morning, my contacts are dry.” He’s not wearing contacts. She knows because she tore apart his bathroom looking for a plunger. She knows because he’s close, like he’s going to kiss her again, and she can see every fleck and striation in his eyes. “So, this is really your first one-night stand?” 

“Yes, I told you that,” she tucks her hair behind her ear, “why would I lie?” 

His shrug verges on an attempt at confidence as he leans to half-whisper in her ear, “they usually don’t last this long.” 

“Well,” she bites her lip and lets it go slowly, glad there’s no one here to assess the optics of the move, “that’s too bad.” 

“I’m going to go destroy the evidence of my…grocery run,” he takes her empty bowl and stands up. 

“And deal with your contacts?” She just wouldn’t be herself if she let him have that inch, and she feels more like herself than she has in a while. 

He blushes and rubs the back of his head with his free hand, “yeah, contacts, I don’t need reminding. Not with how…itchy they are right now.” 

“Whatever,” she stands up to size up his closet, trying to determine where something warmer would be. Probably in the back, and he’s left-handed, “it is actually cold in here, so I’m going to grab a sweatshirt.” She opens the left door, “I promise I won’t steal it, I don’t need any souvenir aside from the psychological trauma of…Stockholm Syndrome.” 

Her words trail off to nearly nothing. Words not worth saying, because they don’t apply anymore. None of this applies. 

She’s staring at a closet full of women’s clothes. Young clothes. The kind of clothes she might wear if she wore more black and if she went anywhere. Aside from this apartment on a whim. 

This one-bedroom apartment where a young woman clearly lives. 

“Astrid,” Hiccup’s voice skips and she turns slowly to face him. 

“Those aren’t your grandma’s coats.” She states. Accusing isn’t necessary. “You may have played me for a fool, but I’m not one.” 

“I didn’t—” He practically drops the bowls onto a desk and gets between her and the closet, like if he’s in the way she won’t remember what she’s seeing, “look, Astrid, I can explain—”

“I don’t need to hear this side of the story!” She can’t look at him anymore, not with the stack of picture frames staring at her from the closet shelf. He covered his bases, hid anything suspicious. Made sure to offer his guest use of the back-stabbing knife. “I’m familiar enough with the other half, I’ve put this one together pretty well.” 

“Astrid, please, it’s not like—”

“Who is she?” She hates that she just said that. She hates that she’s said that before, when she was crying more than yelling and watching her carefully registered future fall apart. “No, never mind, I don’t care. I just—thought I was better than getting roped into this, but I guess not.” 

“Can you please just listen to me?” He follows too close as she retreats to her pile of clothes, hurling his shirt at his face as she gets dressed. “It’s—her name’s Heather. She’s a DJ. The storm cancelled her flight back—”

“Not my problem,” she sits on the edge of the bed, tugging her socks on and hating herself for wondering what Heather looks like. For knowing that Heather is going to spend hours thinking about the same thing. For how petty and small she is because even now, in the moment, she knows that this is better than being on the other side of this coin. 

“Let me explain myself,” he fumbles through a dresser drawer. A dresser drawer full of bras and underwear, and if Astrid didn’t have a vendetta against that stupid toilet, she might throw up. “Here. Just—read this, please.” 

He holds a letter out to her. Written in girly handwriting on college rule. 

Her hand hovers above it for a second before curiosity wins over and she snatches it from him with a glare. 

_Hiccup,_

_Being direct in a letter feels ironic, I guess, but I don’t know how to say this any other way._

_It’s not working out._

_I know we just got the place, and I know that I met your Mom, and I love you but I just don’t see where this is going. I don’t know if it’s living together or if I’ve just been on tour too much, but ~~the connection is~~ I feel like I’m pretending when I’m with you._

_I think we’re just growing apart. Or we already grew apart. I don’t know._

_I’m on the lease, but maybe you can stay with my brother. You have a cousin in town, right? I should know that. We live together, I should have met your family. I’m not trying to get rid of you, I just need some space on my own right now. Have for a while._

_Heather._

“See?” Hiccup asks, voice quiet and husky as she carefully folds the letter back along its worn seam. 

“I—no, I don’t see, if she gave you this Dear John letter and asked you to leave, why are you still here?” She hates that she asks, that she’s still sitting on his bed, that she’s wondering how hard it would be to find Heather on social media. 

Not hard, probably. But she doesn’t think the comparison would accomplish anything. 

“She hasn’t given it to me yet. I don’t know when she wrote it.” He wrings his hands together, knuckles white, and he looks familiar in a way she shouldn’t have let happen. 

“You snooped.” Another not-an-accusation. 

“I didn’t—ok, it fell and I picked it up and saw my name but—”

“What does this have to do with me?” She asks even though she knows the answer. Which is ‘nothing’. This has nothing to do with her, and her involvement is her mistake even if it’s not explicitly her fault. 

“I didn’t think it’d be you.” 

“That doesn’t even make sense—”

“I wanted…I wanted something to hold against her when she finally gave it to me. I wanted an a-ha, I thought—I didn’t think,” he looks at her, green eyes wet and pleading, “I went on a dating site to have something to throw in her face when she dumped me with a note after we’d moved in together—”

“And I fit the bill?” 

“Yes.” He says it like he means it, reaching for her hand with both of his, and she jumps to her feet. She shouldn’t feel betrayed. She used him too. She used him first. Using him was her idea at every turn but the way he’s looking at her makes her feel like she clicked Accept before she read the Terms and Conditions. 

  
“Well that’s—”

“Astrid,” he says like he hopes her name is a balm, but it doesn’t really work, and she hates that they’re out of sync even though he’s awful and she hates him. For real this time, on purpose. Not just an imagined, convenient hatred. He’s everything that hurt her and more. In fact, he put in the effort to make her believe he was different before he ripped the rug out from under her. “She’s right, ok, it hasn’t been working. It’s not—I thought I was getting some preemptive revenge but instead it’s you and—”

“So, I messed up your revenge for you?” She snorts, stalking out to the living room and grabbing her jacket. She checks for her phone, her keys, her purse, because no one could pay her enough to come back here. “Good, it’s what you deserve. I hope it’s…sweet,” she scrambles, “sweet and sour, actually.” 

The opposite of bittersweet. Or maybe adjacent on the color wheel. He doesn’t get to feel bitter, either way, he gave that away. 

“You—I don’t want her—”

“Clearly,” she glares at him and she wishes it worked, that he hadn’t seen how easily removable her outer layer is. Plate mail rather than greaves. Something that holds its shape no matter how long you leave it alone in the dark. 

“I didn’t even know you existed, Astrid.” He says her name like it has value, like it’s a coin under his tongue that will curry favor in the afterlife and she wishes she couldn’t see his leg right now. She wishes that his vulnerability didn’t feel like trust, or that she didn’t want the trust. “If I had I would have ended it so long ago, before I got the note, before—I thought she was—we were—If I’d known about you—”

“You would have what?” 

“I—you’re the one I want to be with.” He was probably high school class president. Or worse, runner up who bet on something lame like saving the world instead of getting everyone a new vending machine. 

She would have voted for him. 

The lump in her throat feels like it’s going to explode. 

“Astrid, the last forty-eight hours—I,” he swallows hard, risking one hand against her jacketed arm as he steps between her and the alarmed front door. And she believes him. She’s seen him vulnerable enough to recognize his honest face. And it doesn’t matter, it can’t, because he _lied_. Systematically. While making it feel like he didn’t lie at all. “I—last night, tonight—sometimes I forgot that other people even existed.” 

He reads her mind like a stolen book and she feels the loss of proceeds. 

“I’m leaving.” 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to dredge anything up—”

“You’re just some funny guy who knows how to write a dating profile,” she clears her throat and stands up straight, shoving his front door open with enough preparation that the alarm doesn’t make her blink, “I think I’ll live.” 

“Astrid—” 

She races down the stairs and to the door. Against who, she’s not quite sure. She doesn’t think he’d follow her in boxers at four in the morning and she wouldn’t let herself care if he did. Because emotions are that easy, right? When they’re big and confusing and stupid, you can just turn them off until you’re equipped to handle them. 

You can just pause. 

She’s so sick of being paused. She’d rather fast-forward at this point, through the tears and confusion and the listless hours of staring at the ceiling and trying to finagle herself into being blamed for other people’s shitty decisions. 

But it doesn’t work that way. 

She feels every shove of her shoulder against the door in real time. Feels the heavy snow shift inch by inch, tumbling onto the walk that someone managed to plow at some point in the last two days. 

They were a pause, in a way, the long, lingering moment that stretches out before disaster. 

The walk home is freezing. Her hands are numb as she fumbles with her key, opening the front door and barely noticing the scene on the couch. 

“You’re home!” Ruffnut fumbles with a blanket, slapping at something suspiciously firm where the gap between her legs should be. “Ah! N—how was it?” 

“Is that from my bed?” Astrid doesn’t wait for an answer before yanking the blanket and revealing Snotlout, scrambling to cover himself with a pillow that Ruffnut tosses him. 

“You’re back!” He yells, like it’s normal for him to be naked on her couch, and she realizes all at once that it would be if she hadn’t camped out here for months, feeling sorry for herself. 

Which she does. Still. Maybe more than ever, but admitting it is different than spending all of her energy trying to hide it. 

“You two are impossible.” 

“So are you!” Ruffnut calls after her, “it’s been two days, quite an extended sexcapade, I’m proud of you—”

She slams her bedroom door so that she doesn’t have to hear anything about pride from someone so happy and pulls out her phone before she can think twice about it, deleting her profile from that stupid dating site. She’s done waiting for her mistakes to blow over, at least this one is shallow enough to shower off and be done with it. 


	7. Chapter 7

Hiccup (3:52am): Astrid please, I can explain. Better than I did. I’m sorry. 

Hiccup (3:52am): Astrid

Hiccup (3:53am): I keep saying your name, I don’t

Hiccup (3:53am): It’s my favorite name

Hiccup (3:53am): I know my name I just a bodily function but I love how you told me that and also none of this matters because I

Hiccup (3:54am): Please, if you get these, please give me your number. Please. 

Hiccup (3:54am): I’m not begging. Not in the manipulative way. Or any way. 

Hiccup (3:56am): Except I actually am begging. 

Hiccup (3:56am): In the pathetic way. 

Hiccup (3:58am): I thought about running after you. I didn’t because well, I was naked, or not, that’s not, I

Hiccup (3:59am): Please, just say anything. Please. I need to talk to you. I

Hiccup (4:02am): I’ve been saying ‘I’ a lot, that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about what this means to you and I’m guessing it couldn’t be worse. This couldn’t have gone worse. I was everything you feared and more. Or less. I don’t

Hiccup (4:03am): I don’t want your comfort, not that you’d give it, I’m saying I’m the worst. I’m saying I’m awful and I’m sorry and this is so bad and it looks even worse than it is and I’d like to talk about exactly how bad it looks with you. Only you.

Hiccup (4:04am): Please, just message me back or give me your number or your address, I won’t stalk you, I’ll just send you a long-winded letter in cursive on cardstock. 

Hiccup (4:05am): I’ll buy cardstock, I can’t write cursive though

This is pointless. And stupid. And the only thing Hiccup cares about even as he gets the notification that Heather’s plane has landed. She’ll be home soon. Fine. It’s fine. 

He should make the bed. He should shower. He should do anything but obsessively message the perfect girl who isn’t responding. 

Astrid. 

Astrid. 

Astrid who feels like home. Astrid who’s gone. Astrid. Astrid. 

He keeps saying her name like it has a hidden definition. Like it’s a code that can unlock some way out of the mess he’s placed himself in. 

It can’t, because there isn’t. 

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. 

Because he made a mess. Not just a mess. A mud pit, in which he voluntarily brought dirt into his life, and then mixed it with water, and then invited someone who lacked the qualifications to turn mud into structure into his life, and somehow, instead of being a disaster, it just lit everything on fire. 

The mud pit is a clay-pit. The moving sculpture of his life fired into place the second that he realized Astrid for what she truly was. Is. 

It has to be possible.

Or, you know, there’s just no reason to any of this. 

But the thing is that after pulling the short stick enough times, it ceases to be random chance and starts to feel like reserved karma. And Hiccup would like to cash in. 

And yes, he understands that the idea of karma is not a genie in a bottle, it is not a magic wand, it cannot magically bring Astrid into his life, not that he’d want it to because—well, she’d hate it—but he thinks there should be some sort of cosmic station where one could exchange the sum of their theoretical suffering for what they want. 

Like he lost a leg, that’s…big ass misery, ok? That was a gigantic ‘fuck you’ from the universe. He endured it with a mostly strong chin and stubborn sense of humor, but right now, he is willing to drop it forever just for a specific configuration of ten digits. 

That’s a pretty good deal, right universe? Deal or No Deal?

Spin The Wheel of Fortune, Universe. 

Do You Want to Be a Millionaire, Universe? 

The Price is Right, as in this is the best he has to offer, so Universe, maybe make your move. 

“Honey, I’m home!” Heather calls from the living room as she disarms the security alarm. 

Check. The universe says, sliding the queen of the castle into view. 

“In the bedroom,” he says back, staring down at Heather’s note, wondering how leading with it would go. Not well, not that there’s any way any of this will go well. 

It’ll be faster maybe, if he leads with the Dear John letter he knew about for weeks that led him to make a ‘fuck you’ account on a dating website and God, he is so stupid. 

“What the fuck is this?” Heather dives right into it, standing in the doorway with a folded piece of paper in her hand. 

“Oh, sorry, I was supposed to be vacuuming with my pearls on,” he says flatly, “I forgot we were going to roleplay Leave it to Beaver, which takes on a very different meaning when you add the sexual element—”

“Hiccup,” Heather sighs his name like it’s an impossible to squelch bodily function, and he can’t keep Astrid off his mind for even a second, can he? “The note, by the front door, what is it?” 

“I’ve…” He swallows hard, wiping his hand on his boxers before picking up his only shred of pitiable evidence, “I have the note right here.” 

“Trade me,” she raises a non-plussed eyebrow, but her hand shakes as he puts her own letter into it and takes the scrap of paper from her. 

_Thanks for last night. I had fun. Great apartment!_

_xx Astrid_

It’s smeared, written in makeup, casual in a way that Astrid isn’t. In a way he thought he was before he met her. His mouth goes dry and he tries to hide it, looking up at Heather and waiting for her to react to her own note. 

She stares at it for a second before frowning and folding a new crease in it. When she holds it up at him like the last card in her Uno hand, it hits him for the first and final time that he really was batting out of his league with her. Not because she’s too good for him, even though his decision process over the last week or so corroborates that, but because she’s wrong for him at some fundamental level that he never believed in. 

He knows he’s playing fast and loose with the concept of karma, but for the first time, fate makes some kind of sense. 

“When did you find this?” She looks ashamed under her hard edges, the ones that don’t blunt and crumble even when they’re alone. The ones he used to think were strong when maybe they’re actually cruel, but he’s not dumb enough to blame her for making him that way. 

Maybe they bring it out in each other. Brought. 

“When did you write it?” 

“Does that matter?” She laughs and Hiccup shrugs, willing himself honest even though it’s hard. 

“Probably not.” 

“Because of Alison, or whoever wrote the slutty little note you left me to find?” 

‘Yes’ is the honest answer, but not the right one. 

“Because you’re right. It’s not working.” He sighs, “it hasn’t been for a while, we’ve been…growing apart—”

“You haven’t been growing at all,” she retorts, “and your snarky, cryptic thing isn’t as charming as it used to be when I’m around it all the time—”

“That’s fair,” he taps his temple, “I live here, it’s not great.” 

“You waited until I was out of town and cheated on me instead of just telling me directly that you’d found my note.” 

“Yeah,” he nods, “and you didn’t give me the note, I think it’s fair to say that communication has been breaking down for a while. And communication is the cornerstone of any relationship, so suffice to say when that breaks down, the relationship goes with it.” 

She shakes her head at him, slowly, a little shocked. He doesn’t remember the last time he actually surprised her, the last time she authentically laughed at his antics instead of spurring him on with a half-interested glint in her eyes. She doesn’t quip back though. That hasn’t happened in a very long time. 

“What happened to you?” She asks after a too long minute and he shrugs. 

“I…realized it was time to be honest. To stop doing this just because we feel like we’re supposed to, because we’ve put so much time into it.” He feels it now, everything that drew him to her in the first place. All the hours and days and weeks they spent together, making friction like it was a resource. “The fact is, I don’t think we’re right for each other. I think we’re just…or at least I was scared that there’d never be anything better.” 

“So, you’re breaking up with me because you’re infused with optimism that we’re both going to find something better.” She shakes her head, looking lighter and bored and not hurt enough for what he did. “You really believe that?” 

“Not believing it wasn’t working.” 

“You’re an idiot,” she points at Astrid’s note, which might as well be his prized possession now, because he’s going to have to move and it’ll fit in his wallet. 

“Can I ask you something?” 

“Yes, I’m furious with you but…I get it. I wrote the note, I wish you hadn’t found it while snooping, I should have just given it to you. I would have if I thought you were capable of being this mature about this—”

“No, not about—we’re broken up, I think we both understand it, but umm…did you ever fake it?” What starts as half a joke ends in some bitter, curious, cringing place that he never wants to visit again, but given that this is probably his last chance to get the facts, he goes for it. “When we were together?” 

He makes a hand gesture that he wishes he hadn’t. Heather shakes her head and he thinks she’s feeling the bad fit too. He thinks, because he’s realizing that he never learned how to read her face, not really. And not because she didn’t let him, and not because he didn’t try, but it’s a language with a different taproot, something he could struggle with for years and never be fluent. 

“A year together. A fucking year and—all this,” she gestures at the apartment that he didn’t even really like, but agreed to because going with the flow was the way to make their bickering day touring apartments end, “gone, and you want to know if I faked it?” 

“You shouldn’t do that,” he lectures, internally cringing but feeling lighter. Vindicated, maybe. Fully through the veil of embarrassment and into someplace free. “It’s no good for you, it didn’t help me.” 

“Right, you do so well with criticism.” 

“Maybe I do,” he shrugs, “I think we both know there are a lot of things we never learned about each other.” 

“You’re an asshole.” 

And that makes him think of Astrid, and how he’s never felt closer to anyone, and how he wants this to be over with and then, how Dagur is probably going to beat him up. He probably should get in touch with his long lost cousin, that’s probably his only chance against Dagur’s impending wrath. 

“I can move out.” 

“Ok.” She stands up and looks at him with dwindling recognition, the polaroid of the present crystallizing in her memory and affirming him eternally as ‘that dickhead’. It’s…it sucks. He sucks. “Let me know when you’re out, I’ll go stay with Dagur.” 

“Shouldn’t take that long,” he regrets how mean it sounds until it seems like she doesn’t care, cut off from him in a way that isn’t new. He should have noticed. They should have talked. They didn’t, he was an asshole, and now the idea of Astrid is a North star brighter than the blizzard and definitely brighter than the vengeance his ego would like to imagine in Heather’s expression. 

Except it’s not there. And he has no ego, not right now, not when he’s so eager to exit this conversation and this chapter in his life. 

She is too. She wrote the note. 

He should have just told her he found it. 

He’s so glad he didn’t, and he’ll hate himself for it later, when the leak in his heart is patched. 

“Alright.” She stands up and he half thinks she’s going to shake his hand, but she doesn’t, “well, bye, Hiccup.” 

Her voice might catch. His throat might hurt. 

As soon as she leaves, he opens the dating site again and tries to message Astrid. 

Hiccup (5:10am): I broke up with her

CustomerHelpBot (5:10am): The account you are attempting to contact has been inactivated

Hiccup (5:11am): good job changing your name, very convincing

CustomerHelpBot (5:11am): The account you are attempting to contact has been inactivated, for further information, please contact customer service at 303-555-7893

Hiccup (5:11am): that’s a really weird way to give me your number. 

CustomerHelpBot (5:11am): The account you are attempting to contact has been inactivated, for further information, please contact customer service at 303-555-7893

Hiccup (5:12am): I’ll call the number

He gives the supposed threat a minute to sink in before doing just that, and the robotic voice that picks up honestly shocks him. 

“You have reached the customer service hotline for America’s Favorite Dating Site, what can I do to help you?” 

It’s not Astrid. 

Not remotely. 

For one, the voice is entirely humorless, entirely dead. Bored in a way she’s not capable of, he’s seen it as she prowled around this apartment he hates, looking for something to do. Also, it’s a guy. 

“Hi, I—Hi, you’re not—I’m actually looking to get in touch with someone I met on your site—”

“What is your name, sir?” 

“Hiccup Haddock, my username is—”

“PrincessOutpost?” 

“Thanks for not making me say it out loud.” He was drunk when he thought of that. He was drunk when he made this stupid plan. He was sober when Astrid showed up, eyes bright and shoulders strong, breathing hard as she introduced herself and shook his hand. 

So awkward. So pretty. 

And no, that first time wasn’t great. It was…necessary, like spring cleaning, but after they talked…after they got to know each other…

“I’m afraid we can’t give information about any of our cancelled accounts to anyone but the police.” 

“She cancelled?” 

“The last profile that you interacted with is inactive, as of even earlier this morning.” 

“That—come on, man, it—”

“I’m sure it was magical, but we are legally obligated not to give our customers information out.” 

“I really just need a phone number or an address or…or a last name.” 

“I get that sometimes you don’t get a chance to talk much—”

“Rude,” Hiccup snaps. 

“But we are legally obligated to not give customers’ information to anyone but the police.” 

“The police?” He pauses, picking Astrid’s eyeliner note up off of the bed and staring at it, resisting the stupid, fond, useless urge to swipe his thumb across her name. 

“Yes, they’re men in blue who enforce the laws.” 

“So, if I know she’d broken the law, you’re saying I could get that personal information.” 

“Sir, our service doesn’t exist to help stalkers—”

“What about people who break and enter?” 


	8. Chapter 8

“Knock knock,” Ruffnut cracks Astrid’s bedroom door and peeks inside, and thankfully Astrid notices the plate of pancakes in her hand before calling her out on her less than stellar knocking etiquette. 

“Those better be for me, I’m not in the mood to watch you eat pancakes.” 

“A peace offering,” she nods, handing the plate to Astrid. There’s a smiley face of strawberries on the top pancake and it makes her think of oatmeal from a world ago, and her stomach feels like it’s twisting around a rock. 

“What did I do to deserve a peace offering?” 

“Did you tell her yet?” Snotlout appears in the doorway, thankfully clothed, and Ruffnut glares at him. 

“Tell me what?” 

“The pancakes were to keep your mouth full while I very gently tried to tell you that well…” She exhales, and Astrid wonders when Ruffnut grew up and started trying to be gentle. 

Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe Astrid is just _fragile_ now, and it’s a relief when the thought makes her furious, some forgotten lick of heat and anger swirling in her chest. 

“What is it?” She takes a bite of the pancakes, forcing it down even though it feels dry in her mouth. 

“Should I be here for this, or…” Snotlout points over his shoulder, “or I can go—”

“Just tell me,” Astrid snaps, the newly re-discovered edge in her voice making Ruffnut raise her eyebrows. 

“We really liked having the place to ourselves,” she says, “Snotlout is ready to take over the lease, and since I’m the primary name on the apartment—”

“Yeah,” Astrid doesn’t need to hear the dissertation about why she needs to move on from this stagnant phase, because it’s finally on repeat in her head again, the silent assertion that tomorrow needs to be different. That she needs to make tomorrow different. “You’re right, I’ll…start figuring it out.” 

“I told you she could take it,” Snotlout tells Ruffnut, “it’s Astrid, after all.” 

“Yeah, and she hasn’t been acting like Astrid—”

“ _She_ ’s right here,” Astrid clears her throat, “and I get it, I’ve…kept your second bedroom occupied long enough.” 

“You can stay as long as you need to,” Snotlout nods, “like a day. Two days. Through the week, maybe—”

“I’ll…figure it out.” She says, shocked when she actually believes it. Or at least she believes she can believe it. That she might be believable once again. 

The second bite of pancakes tastes better. 

“Ok, then,” Snotlout claps, “we can share boxes, if you want, I’ve got like, a fuckton of boxes at my place—” He cuts off with a grunt when Ruff smacks him in the stomach. “Hey, I’m being helpful—”

“What happened to you?” Ruffnut asks, risking her fingers to steal a strawberry off of Astrid’s plate. 

She thinks about telling the whole truth, but doesn’t want to cry about it. She doesn’t want to hear about what an asshole Hiccup is. She doesn’t want to think about him, and she’s starting to remember how to force her thoughts in a direction. 

“Apparently it took a near hostage situation for me to get off my ass.” 

“Or some good dick,” Ruffnut jokes, but she looks relieved, and Astrid wonders how long she’s had that worried frown for Astrid to be so used to it. 

“Wasn’t all that,” she lies, still not thinking about him. Not remembering what he said as she was leaving, after he proved to be everything she hates. Not thinking about how it hurt to hurt him, even though that’s stupid. Beyond stupid. 

“Well,” Ruffnut pats her leg, “either way, we have to get ready for the party tonight.” 

“Shouldn’t I be finishing my application or looking for an apartment with a totally possible monthly rent of zero dollars?” She laughs, a little overwhelmed, but after months thinking she’d never even be whelmed again, it’s not unwelcome. 

“All the responsible returns at once,” Ruffnut snorts, “it’s our last New Years as roommates, come on. One last party. Snotlout’s dumb pretty friends are invited, you can continue your successful streak…”

“Oh God, no thank you.” She sets the half-eaten pancakes aside, “I’m good, on that front. Dating profile deleted, lesson learned, focus regained.” 

“So it was horrible dick, then,” Snotlout muses, “you know, I always kind of thought something would happen with the three of us while you two were living together. And now that the days—or even hours, you could say, are numbered—”

“Still my room,” Astrid points at the door, “both of you, out.” 

“All the bossiness back at once,” Ruffnut smacks Snotlout on the back of the head as she stands up, “and you, stop being gross.” 

“You love me,” he follows her, grabbing her butt, and her giggle makes Astrid’s chest twinge. 

And she doesn’t think of Hiccup. She doesn’t think how for a night it felt like something. How for a day it felt like friends. How he looked at her like he saw her, like she was more than her recent mistakes. 

Because even if that were true, it doesn’t change what he did. When someone tells you who they are, it’s best to believe them, and Hiccup showed his hand. 

And his foot. And she wishes he’d never made it her business, but there’s no changing that now. There’s just forward. 

00000

“Really, I think you’d enjoy it.” The guy who can’t read social cues drones on even as Astrid tries to make herself as obviously uninterested as possible, nursing her third drink of the night and trying not to resent everyone else for having fun. “I don’t understand the stigma so many adults have against animation, but really it’s a show about the bond between man and dragon, and the world building on an already beloved franchise is vast. You could say chief-sized.” 

He laughs at his own joke. The joke that she doesn’t get, or care to get. 

“And with the coincidence of your name and appearance,” he gestures at her and she doesn’t remember Hiccup saying she was pretty over a video call, “I think you could really get into it. Plus, the romance angle.” He chuckles and she gets the impression he’s going to reach for her, or something, and she wonders who invited him. She was promised Snotlout’s dumb, pretty friends, not some guy obsessed with a kids’ show about dragons that he’s been harping on about for twenty minutes. “A great slow burn between well, the beautiful Viking warrior and the late-blooming future chief.” 

He gestures at himself. 

Her mother always told her that if she doesn’t have anything nice to say, she shouldn’t say anything at all. Her uncle always told her that was bullshit, and sometimes people need a reality check. 

The only problem is she doesn’t know what reality he’s living in, so she doesn’t know from which direction to apply that check. 

She blinks slowly and chugs the rest of her drink to avoid that decision. 

“You know, it’s polite to respond when someone is trying to have a conversation with you.” 

“Dude,” she stands up, “I’m just intimidated as hell, you know.” 

“Oh, no, _Astrid_ ,” he says her name like it matters more than the rest of her and she doesn’t think about Hiccup pleading it at her, saying if he’d known she existed, his life would be different, and it’s a cruel twist that some nerd sees fate in her materialization tangential to his fantasy. It’s like she hasn’t existed while she’s been unseen, and it makes her want to scream. 

“You’ve got me built up into this whole…thing, and I’m really not.” She says some sanitized version of what she’d scream at Hiccup if she saw him. She leaves out the ‘yet’ that she thought he had the capacity to understand, even if only for a second. 

“No, but you are,” he tells her, and she hates that it’s not a line, that he’s staring through her and telling her who he wants her to be. 

Mostly, she hates it because she was hoping for that a week ago. 

She hates it because it’s easy to identify the pivot point where she stopped waiting for someone else to instruct her and started asking for more. Better. She hates how she’d have to precede her rant at Hiccup with ‘thank you’. 

Good thing that won’t happen. 

“Fucking hell,” she swears to herself as she flops on one side of the couch, wishing she’d thought to grab another drink. 

“Astrid, right?” Someone approaches her, a tinge of concern in their drunk voice, and she looks him up and down. 

Handsome, nothing behind the eyes. No wit or charm or jokes about Bundy paraphernalia that should have made her run. 

“Are you Snotlout’s dumb, pretty friend?” She asks. He smirks, but the concern grows too as he points at the open front door where two uniformed police officers are waiting. 

“I mean, I don’t really know him that well, but sure. I can be.” He grins, teeth straight and uniform. And there’s charm there, sure, but it’s generic. A mass-produced kind of ubiquity to it that’s comforting, like she could get it anywhere and be reasonably confident in the outcome. “But are you Astrid?” 

“I can be,” she jokes, wondering what the nerd would have said to the same line. She doesn’t wonder what Hiccup would have said because it probably would have been something obnoxious, like he could pull off ‘I know’. 

“No, I mean—are you the Astrid Hofferson secondary on the lease? They’re looking for Astrid Hofferson.” He points at the cops again. 

“Well, considering I’m coming off the lease this week, I think any noise complaints should go to Ruffnut Thorston, who is over there.” 

Maybe it’s the universe righting itself.

“No, they’re asking particularly for you. Something about breaking and entering?” Stupid-Handsome scratches the back of his neck and she freezes, smile turned waxy on her face. 

Of course not. That would require too much luck. Be too easy. 

00000

“Did you write this note, or not?” The officer at the station asks for what feels like the hundredth time, and Astrid knows, finally and absolutely, that Thank You notes are stupid and that her mom is and has always been wrong. 

What are you even supposed to do when you get a Thank You note anyway? Does it require yet another Thank You? Is it just the start to a never-ending procession of false politeness that people had time for before the internet? 

A gift is a gift, an in-person thank you is enough, writing it down is just a legal liability. 

“I don’t know where you got that.” 

“That doesn’t answer my question, Miss Hofferson.” 

She should ask for a lawyer. 

She can’t afford a lawyer. 

Hiccup should have to pay for her lawyer for framing her. 

“Yes, I wrote the note,” she blurts, “but I did not leave it anywhere than I had broken and entered into—”

“It was found in a Mr. Johann’s apartment, inside of a broken window.” 

“Yeah, I obviously just left an eyeliner note behind after smashing a window.” 

“Is that a confession?” 

“It’s sarcasm,” she sputters, “I didn’t—who told you about this? Was it a guy? On the phone he sounds like he’s plugging his nose like a nerd who never learned to hold his breath in the pool?” She doesn’t think of Hiccup’s voice. Her heart doesn’t twinge like it’s been stepped on. 

“Let me escort you to the holding cell while I confirm our source.” The hesitation is obvious, and she feels rooted to the shitty, cold, plastic chair. 

“What happens if I don’t ‘let’ you?” She asks, half-wishing she’d taken the dragon nerd up on the offer to play Viking warrior in a back room, except even joking about that internally makes her feel claustrophobic, like there’s no room in her for any more complication. 

Like Hiccup is weaseling his way back in where he doesn’t belong and crowding her. 

“Follow me, Miss.” 

00000

The next hour stretches. In fact, she’s not entirely sure that it’s an hour, maybe all seconds just feel like hours when she’s in a concrete holding cell next to a woman who has puked into a government provided bucket 4 times. 

This is going to look great on her medical school application. 

_Why do you want to be a doctor?_

Well, my time in jail really showed me that the public’s opinion on alcohol is irresponsible. Alcohol poisoning shouldn’t be a social activity. Except it should, because it sounds like something I want to engage in right now, given that I had to mention jail on a medical school application. Also, I want to help people, or something, especially after all this time I’ve spent being helped. Not that karma operates on an economic model of supply and demand, but also, from what I know about capitalism and upward mobility, I’m not taking any chances. 

“Astrid Hofferson?” The officer appears again, asking her name like he didn’t just spend an irrationally long time confirming it. “You made bail.” 

“That’s impossible. I haven’t even made my phone call yet.” 

“Well, there’s someone downstairs offering to pay your bail.” 

“Who is it?” She narrows her eyes, trying to remember where Ruffnut was when she left the party. 

“Some guy,” the officer shrugs. 

“That narrows it down,” she snorts. 

“Most people don’t turn down bail.” 

“I’m not most people,” she crosses her arms, getting comfortable on the bench next to Pukey McPukerson. “Who is it?” 

“Some guy,” the officer repeats, “tall, skinny, saying something about convincing his neighbor not to press charges.” 

“No.” She puts her foot down. Or she would, if it weren’t already down. It’s so down the ball of her foot is starting to go asleep from the hard floor and she lets the tingle anchor her. 

“No?” 

“I don’t want his bail. Just give me my phone call.” 

“You’re turning down bail?” The officer asks and she nods, “I…honestly don’t know what to do with that.” 

“I’ll take it,” Pukey offers and Astrid glares at her. 

“You just stick to your bucket.” She grumbles, “you only get one liver, you know.” 

“Oh, you’re a doctor now?” Pukey rolls her eyes and Astrid crosses her arms. 

“Not yet.” The _yet_ feels like fire under that numb foot and she nods to herself, more resolute in her protest. 

“So, you want me to go tell this guy that you don’t want his bail?” The cop asks and she raises an eyebrow. 

“I’ll tell him.” 

“I’m not supposed to let you out of holding without bail.” 

“I thought you didn’t know what to do with me,” Astrid antagonizes. She’s not even sure why. She’s glad she’s white. Not in a ‘it’s great to be white’, disgusting way, but a ‘this little emotional peak would have had devastating consequences if she weren’t white’ way. 

She’s entirely shocked when the officer lets her out, apparently taking her suggestion to let her tell Hiccup where he can shove his bail, and that’s how she ends up at the top of the stairs, looking down at him. 

He has balloons. 

He looks miserable. Desperate. All of the things that her pettiest side has always wanted someone to feel when she left, instead of the other way around. 

“What if I told you that I helped? Would you lock me up with her?” He asks, and the officer behind the desk coughs. 

“Are you confessing, or?” 

“Yeah, no, I have no interest in this particular bail.” She points back towards the holding cell, “I’d like my phone call, please.” 

“Astrid,” Hiccup calls up at her, like he’s said her name a thousand times, and her fingernails dig into her forearm with the force it takes to keep her arms crossed. “I—I didn’t know what else to do, you deleted your account—”

“Not this, you idiot.” She flings the insult like it weighs more than it does, and he goes along with the charade, crumpling slightly in a way she wishes she didn’t notice. 

“I know. I know, I just—I broke up with Heather—”

“I don’t care.” She almost wishes that she would yell, to impress upon him how much she means it, but it comes out calculating. No, more than calculating, like she knows the answers already, and she feels like a liar. 

“Please.” He begs. She should like it. It makes her feel worse and she wishes it were easier to resent him. 

“Phone call. Please.” 

She gets Ruffnut’s voice mail. Pukey lives up to her nickname and pukes twice more. She thinks about her applications. 

_Why do you want to be a doctor?_

‘Because no matter what has happened in my life, the idea of helping people has been a North Star. Yes, I know I have a fucking criminal record for breaking and entering, but in my defense, I really had to pee. Also, the guy who half-framed me used me to cheat on his girlfriend so…

So, it doesn’t matter that he’s smart and funny and that it felt like he saw me. It doesn’t matter that he admitted he was wrong. It doesn’t matter that no one has ever looked at me like they were desperate before. 

It doesn’t matter that I liked it, even vindictively. Even cruelly. Even in a last-minute attempt to feel like I wasn’t part of the problem.’ 

So, yeah. She’ll get into medical school. 

As a patient. 

Because how else is she going to get the therapy she so clearly needs without health insurance? 

“Astrid Hofferson,” the officer returns, “you made bail. Again.” 

“Lucky bitch,” Pukey moans into her bucket. 

“Is it—”

“It’s someone else,” the officer sighs, “do you need to vet them too?” 

“I wouldn’t mind.” She stands up, shocked all over again when the officer escorts her to the top of the stairs. 

Ruffnut is downstairs counting money and the relief is almost perfectly drowned out when she sees Hiccup still standing there, stupid balloon waving in the heater blasting over his head. 

“Is this bail acceptable to you?” The officer asks and she nods, resolving to ignore Hiccup even as she can’t look away from the fact that even the top of his head is miserable. 

Good. 

He deserves it. 

She’s not sad that he was so stupid. He doesn’t feel like something lost. It’s…post-orgasmic hormones that make her want him to be better. It’s just the result of a long, satisfying experiment that makes her want to accept an apology. 

“Parked the car,” Snotlout appears in the doorway, “paid for fifteen minutes, so can we hurry this up?” 

“Snotlout?” Hiccup bolts upright, recognition in his voice startling him out of his situationally appropriate moping. 

“Hiccup?” Snotlout freezes, “what’s—why do you have balloons?” 

“Why…don’t you?” Hiccup snorts, miserable and funnier for it, “everyone knows that New Year’s Eve is balloon hour at the police station.” 

The TV behind the intake desk shows the ball dropping and Snotlout and Ruffnut move habitually, pecking each other on the lips, and Astrid thinks she’d rather be in the holding cell. Maybe her bail can be donated to charity. She could be the face of The ‘don’t online date instead of finishing things’ Foundation. The ‘just because Grandma is on Facebook doesn’t mean there aren’t still people on the internet who can and will ruin your life’ Initiative. 

The ‘sometimes when you make your bed you do actually have to lie in it’ Charitable Organization, under the sub-heading of ‘Don’t have sex with people who might interact with your arrest record’. 

“Can we go home?” Astrid breaks the tension, leaning into Ruffnut’s side. “The meter’s running.” 

“But it’s Hiccup,” Snotlout whispers at Ruffnut, “you know my weirdo cousin—”

“Thanks for that,” Hiccup blushes and Astrid wants to ask why and to hit him and mostly, to never want to see him again, because it’s impossible to stop looking at him. 

“What have you been up to?” Snotlout punches him in the shoulder and Hiccup looks desperately at Astrid again, undistracted by the distraction. “Wait—no, you know Astrid?” 

“He got me arrested.” 

“I didn’t know her last name,” Hiccup defends himself, “Astrid—I—there’s no way in any brand of hell that I could stop thinking about you and—”

“You fucked Astrid?” Snotlout claps his hands against his cheeks, “this is—Oh my God, I don’t think I’ve seen you since high school graduation and now you’re the guy my girlfriend’s roommate hooks up with—”

“Snot!” Astrid snaps, “let’s go.” 

“Astrid.” Hiccup stumbles between her and the door, stupid balloon slapping against a corner. “You have to listen to me.” 

“Hmm, ok, I’ll listen to you when you’re a witness against me, in court, because you got me arrested—”

“That was one time!” He yells, too loud for a police station, “sorry, I—too soon, I get it. I get it. I—we had two nights together.” 

“Because of a blizzard.” 

“Whatever, I don’t—” He reaches for her but thinks better of it and his hands shake between them with the desire to make his point. “We had two nights together and yes, I should have told you about Heather. I thought about it, but I couldn’t—I didn’t want to waste a second—it might not work out.” 

“And he sees sense,” her heart falls anyway, with all that saturated green staring at her, all that intensity that she can’t make unfamiliar in her mind. “Let’s go, guys.” 

“No, no. Please.” He’s smart enough to only tap Ruffnut on the shoulder, “it might not work out, because two nights is…an insufficient trial period.” 

“I’m not a Netflix subscription!” She snaps, and he has a way of making her certain that she wants to cling to, no matter how stupid that is. 

“No. You’re—if we spend more time together, you might realize that I’m…insufferable during game shows. And I might learn that you’re…really into weird cartoons that I hate.” 

“You did not just _say_ that!” 

He read her mind again, and it’s not allowed. 

“Can we move this along?” An officer indicates and Snotlout ushers them towards the door. 

“Fuck. Shit. Fuck.” Hiccup sputters, “not at you, not at anyone, I just—you can’t storm out again. You can’t. Not without hearing what I have to say—”

“You got me arrested.” Astrid growls, “I spent the last few hours in a cell with someone throwing up, I—this is going on my record, how am I getting into medical school now?” 

“You’re applying?” He grins, too wide, too bright, and she’d hit him if she could trust herself not to enjoy the authenticity in his reaction. “That’s—I didn’t know what to do—”

“Not get me thrown in jail?” She proposes. 

“Can we potentially leave jail out of the argument for why you never want to see me again?” He winces even as he’s talking and she recognizes the face she’s felt herself make too many times, unwilling to stop even though she’s behind. “For now, at least. I truly believe this will be funny later, this is something we’ll laugh about—”

“Jail.” She re-iterates. “Like with bars. And cops. And a single phone call. Actual jail.” 

“I think it’s one of those jokes that needs time.” He’s defeated. She hates it. She hates herself for hating it. 

“Ok,” she takes her phone from the evidence box on the nearby counter and hands it to him. “Give me your number. I will call you the second this is funny.” 

Which is never. 

“Ok,” he nods, and she refuses to look at his quick thumbs programming his number into her phone. She refuses to see whether he’s Hiccup or Princess Outpost, because it doesn’t matter. She’s not going to text it. 

“Ok.” She takes the phone back. 

He hands her the stupid balloons. 

“So…bye,” she makes herself say it, waving him towards the door. 

“You’ll…” He swallows the rest of whatever he was about to say and she shrugs. 

He leaves. 

It’s different being left when the other party doesn’t want to go. Less lonely. More permanent, if only for her choice being implicated. 

“Sorry about that,” Astrid says reflexively to the officer who’d dealt with her in the cell and he holds a hand up. 

“That guy was nuts.” 

“Can I get his number though?” Snotlout asks, scuffing his shoe against the linoleum. Astrid blinks at him. “What?” 

“You’re so stupid,” Ruffnut fills in the gap, hugging Astrid a little tighter, and Astrid’s going to miss her. She’s going to miss this entire miserable, unending, painful period of her life, isn’t she? 

Closing doors always hurts, even when they need to be closed. Even more when they don’t. 

“He’s my long-lost cousin, and I learn that he’s Astrid’s hostage dick? I’m curious—”

“Snotlout.” Ruff cautions, careful again. 

And that’s not what Astrid wants. She doesn’t want people to be careful, she wants honest. She wants…

She blinks back a frustrated approximation of a tear and looks up at the stupid balloon Hiccup gave her. One side reads ‘I’m sorry’. The other reads ‘I’m an asshole’. 

She laughs. 

Not a cynical laugh, but a real bubble of something from underneath the layers. Her intuition taking the reins. 

“Fuck,” she sits down in yet another shitty plastic chair, pulling up her contacts and finding Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III (an awful name). His address is there. So is his social security number. She’d steal his identity and start over if his name weren’t a bodily function. “You guys can go.” 

“Are you sure?” Ruffnut asks, but there’s relief there too. 

“Yeah, I’ll get you back for the bail, ok?” 

“And you’ll get me Hiccup’s number—”

“Snotlout, go.” She orders him like she has the authority and it seems to work. And then she calls Hiccup. It gets through half a ring before he’s picking up, breathless and pathetic and like he needs her. She doesn’t know if she’s ever been needed, but she likes it. “You are an asshole, for the record.” 

“Recorded.” 

“And an idiot.” 

“Yeah.” 

“And next time you decide to attempt romance, at least practice your speech first because that was awful.” 

“Basically, I was forced to endure it while like, astrally projecting above myself to judge myself.” He laughs, sound husky in the speakers, and she thinks he’s outside, in the cold. “It was awful.” 

“In the spirit of constructive criticism, it was appalling. Truly.” 

“I’m sorry I put you in jail.” He answers, authentic, and when she looks at the police station door, he’s outside, watching her hold his stupid vulgar balloon while the officers probably judge her sanity. 

She hangs up and steps outside, not surprised when he kisses her even as she doesn’t expect the tenderness in his hand against the back of her neck, the soft desperation in his lips. 

“Too soon,” she pushes him back, fingers staying fisted in his lapels, largely outside of her control. “You got me arrested.” 

“But have you considered how much tougher you seem now?” He jokes, gloved fingers twined in hers as he tugs her down the sidewalk. 

“Absolutely,” she snorts, “already thinking about how to incorporate this into my application.” 

“Well, don’t worry about Mr. Johann’s interpretation,” he squeezes her hand and she squeezes back, sure of herself for some reason she can’t be sure of. 

“Oh yeah, did you kill him?” 

“Totally.” 

“Without me?” She teases, and it’s a new year, the snowbanks on either side of the street barely soot-stained. 

“Too many witnesses out here,” he scans the empty street, “your place?” 

“To be fair, I don’t really have a place, I have a bed for a couple more days of Ruffnut’s charity.” 

“Oh, I only ask because I don’t have a place either,” he says it like he means it and she believes him because she wants to. Because it feels instinctive in a way she feared she’d forgotten. 

“You’re a catch.” 

“Yeah,” he snorts, and she squeezes his hand first this time. 

“I think I’m ready for that kiss now.” 

“What if I don’t like your prison breath?” He tucks her hair behind her ear, fingers strong and hesitant under her jaw. 

“Probably shouldn’t have sent me to prison.” 

“Fair enough.” 


End file.
